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FabricioCarraro - TAC’15 Pushkin, Rätsel | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4497 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 401 of 439 26 March 2014 at 6:07pm | IP Logged |
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@Cristianoo No no, they have some events organized by the members that take place in almost every medium to big city. Here in São Paulo the meeting happens every Tuesday at Rua Augusta, close to the Consolação Station at Avenida Paulista. We all go there to a bar and chat while drinking beers and caipirinhas =) Most people are Brazilians, but there are a lot of gringos as well!
------------------- Japanese - Genki After some weeks off, I'm back to Genki! I'm always reviewing old lessons on my way to work, and this week I've started chapter 11. I already covered the dialogue and vocabulary, now onto the grammar part. So far I haven't done any of the book exercises and drills because everything was pretty straightforward, but I noticed that I'm starting to mix the uses of the "dictionary form" and the "-te form", so I'll probably do the exercises from lesson 8 on, and always do them from now on. CouchSurfing meeting The meeting was last night and it was nice, but I should have done more than I actually did. I spent most of the time with a Dutch girl and 2 Brazilian friends who did not speak a word of Dutch, so I ended up speaking with her in English 95% of the time ¬¬ Yes, I know... but luckily I added her on Facebook and she'll be in Brazil for another 4 months, so I might have better chances to practice my Dutch. Besides that, I spoke a little Italian and Japanese, but the natives were either busy with other people or leaving, so we couldn't chat for long. Finally, my 2 Brazilian friends and me were also talking to a Romanian friend of mine, which leads me to my other topic: Romanian? One of my Brazilian friends there is also a great polyglot, who speaks 10 or 11 languages. So he was talking to the Romanian girl and he came up with a challenge: we both should "use" her while she's in Brazil (until July), studying Romanian at home and taking her to a café or a bar once a week to practice speaking. It's like "free" Italki lessons for Romanian, where we'll only pay for the drinks..... aaand she agreed. Now I'm not sure. I'm pretty busy with Japanese and German was supposed to be my next language. Normally, I wouldn't do it, but it's such a good opportunity.... What do you guys think? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4489 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 402 of 439 26 March 2014 at 7:54pm | IP Logged |
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Não vai ter muito problemas com roméno, e uma língua bastante de fácil para os
brasileiros. Tens coragem! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4497 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 403 of 439 31 March 2014 at 4:55pm | IP Logged |
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@tarvos Assim espero, meu amigo!
-------------- Romanian - Assimil & Nico Well, I decided to give it a try. I checked Assimil first lessons and Nico's videos (she's a Romanian girl who teaches Romanian on Youtube, and her videos are very nice!) and apparently Romanian is quite far from what I expected. Apart from some cognates with Italian/French and Russian, which helped me a lot, maaaaaaaaaaaaaaany words are just "random". Chatting with @tarvos, he told me that they're usually from Latin, Greek or Hungarian (not exactly a relief). Also, verb conjugation seems quite a nightmare with its crazy vowel and consonant shifts (actually, not only for verb conjugation, but also to create plurals, declensions and pretty much everything in the language), as well as the necessity to add infixes to some verbs (esc, ez). On the other hand, I really like the sound of it, which seems to me like a mix of Italian, Latin and something slavic. On top of that, I have a native friend willing to help us learn it, which is the best thing so far. Today we'll have our first "session", and I hope that after (less than) a week I'll be able to open my mouth at least to say something other than "bună seara". Wish me luck! Japanese - Anki & Laoshu Even thought I've given Romanian some attention for the past week, I didn't abandon Japanese! I did mostly listening exercises, vocabulary study with Anki (which helps a lot) and texting with some native friends. The coolest thing happened yesterday evening though. I was watching Moses McCormick's (Laoshu) new level-up video on Youtube, and in this video he spoke Japanese twice. He seems to speak it quite well, and I was thrilled that I could understand most of it. Again, it was mostly basic conversation, but it still shows that I'm progressing. =) Russian - Friends & in-laws Soooo I'm finally practicing my Russian everyday! A friend of my wife's got divorced and needed a place to stay for some time, while she gets her life back on track and looks for a new apartment, so now she's staying with us since Saturday. She knows that I learn Russian and that I love using it, so although her Portuguese is very good, she tries to always talk to me in Russian, which is awesome! Besides that, I had a blast last Saturday. I woke up around noon and my wife was talking on Skype with her parents. They saw me going to the kitchen, I waved and said "hi", but I had just woken up and didn't want to make a fool of myself trying to speak Russian when I could barely speak Portuguese =P Some minutes later, my wife called me and said that they wanted to chat a little. At first I was kind of worried that my Russian wouldn't work in the morning, but what happened was actually the complete opposite. We chatted for around 10 minutes in Russian, and my father-in-law really was in shock. He kept telling me and my mother-in-law every minute about how my Russian had improved, and that he was thrilled. At the goodbye, they even thanked me for my Russian. It was really awesome, and it made me proud that they're happy with my level =) Anyway, I'll try to keep up the good work and study Romanian, Japanese and Russian for the time being. I know that focusing on so many languages might not be a good idea, but let's see how it goes for the next weeks. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4489 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 404 of 439 31 March 2014 at 5:31pm | IP Logged |
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Concerning Romanian vocabulary, there's also plenty from Turkish (Romania was under the
Ottoman Empire). Example: dușman ”enemy”. Edited by tarvos on 31 March 2014 at 5:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4497 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 405 of 439 02 April 2014 at 7:28pm | IP Logged |
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@tarvos I forgot about that one! haha
----------- Romanian - The first conversation Guys, I'm still amazed! As I said on my last post, Monday we were gonna have out first "session" in Romanian, and it went shockingly well!!! After 1 week "studying" Romanian, my friend and I somehow managed to maintain the conversation for 2 whole hours, always in Romanian!!! We talked about many many things, such as languages, traveling, football, music, Romanian culture.... and our native friend was awesome, choosing the right words to use, knowing how to keep the conversation going, speaking in a reasonable pace.... she could be a great teacher, even though she's studying Engineering at university. Needless to say that we made lots and lots of mistakes, especially regarding consonant and vowel shifts, but as far as vocabulary is concerned, the best thing for us was the fact that we both know Italian, French and Russian, so even if we didn't know a word, we could make an educated guess and most of the time we'd be correct. A tip for anyone interested in Romanian: learning the "random" basic words and knowing at least one Latin language can help immensely. I'm really happy about it now, since it was a huuuuuge motivation booster. Now, Romanian doesn't seem like a monster anymore. Of course, dabbling in it is completely different from speaking properly, not to say about being able to write it, but it worked perfectly to give me what I needed to continue studying it. CouchSurfing I shouldn't even mention it here, because I spent almost the whole evening speaking in Portuguese with some friends at the meeting. I exchanged some sentences in Italian with a friend, and a little in Russian and Romanian, but nothing considerable. In terms of languages, it was a meaninless evening, in terms of fun, a great one =) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4497 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 406 of 439 07 April 2014 at 5:04am | IP Logged |
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Japanese - Genki
Aaaand lesson 11 is over! As Josquin made me notice recently, I have now only 1 more lesson to go through! The first grammar point was the sufix ~たい, which, added to a verb, means "to want to do something". I already knew that one, so it was あさめしまえ =) Then, the next one was the suffixes ~たり ~たりする, which are used to say that you (or someone else) performed two activities at the same time, just like using the "te"-form, but here it implies that you did those things, among others. The third is the one I had most trouble with, not because of its explanation, but because I'd seen this structure before and I wonder if this is the only applicable type of sentence. It's "past tense of a verb + ことがある", meaning "As for ......, I've already done it", or "As for ....., I've never done it". For everyone learning Japanese or natives, is this the only way to use this ことが...? The last point was about the particle や connecting two nouns, and its difference to と is similar to the 2nd grammar point of this lesson: the new one means something like "A and B, for example", implying that there may be other things. Looking forward to the final lesson! I love Genki! =) Japanese - Italki Soooo, today I had another Japanese lesson on Italki. I actually almost didn't have it twice... I went to a bar yesterday (as I will tell later on this post), woke up 20 minutes before the scheduled time and didn't remember I was going to have a lesson. I miraculously remember it when I was flipping through the channels and stopped at the Japanese channel, that was showing a documentary film about penguins. Then I ran to the computer and got prepared, but my teacher only showed up 30 minutes later, because she had misundestood our time schedule. Anyway, the lesson went well and she even complimented my Japanese, but I felt that it was a little harder than the last time, when I was studying only Japanese and everyday. Maybe adding Romanian to the bowl wasn't a nice move, as I already expected, but it's such a great opportunity and I can't give it up right now. Russian - Interlingua book + Friend Have you guys ever heard of Interlingua? They write bilingual books, and my friend and I decided to give it a try. We bought their book for Russian: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Lev Tolstoy, and I'll be reading it on my Kindle for the next time. As for my wife's friend who's living here at home, now she speaks to me more often in Portuguese. I don't want to be rude and ask her to speak to me in Russian, but I really wish she would do it more often... French - Le scaphandre et le papillon I finally got to watch this very famous and interesting French movie. The story is really impressive. For those of you who don't know it, it's based on the real life of a journlist called Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French Elle magazine, who suffered a stroke and got into a coma, and when he woke up he was completely paralyzed, and could only move his eyes. So, his speech therapists came up with a method for him to be able to communicate, reciting repeatedly the French frequency-ordered alphabet, and he had to blink when she said the right letter. After some months, he finished a book about his condition, and 3 days after the book got published, he passed away. The book is apparently a best seller, and the film was nominated for many prizes. Very interesting, and a great way to practice my listening skills in French. International Birthday Last but not least, yesterday we celebrated my wife's birthday! As I've mentioned, we went to a bar and it was one of the most international "regular" parties (except for CouchSurfing meetings) that I've been to in my entire life. Apart from my wife's Russian friends, there were (obviously) Brazilians, and also friends from Ukraine, Italy, Greece and Chile. We had a lot of fun, even too much, considering that I almost overslept and missed my Italki lesson =P, but I loved it! =) I managed to speak some Italian with my wife's boss and a little Russian with her friends, unfortunately not much. Still, better than nothing! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4497 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 407 of 439 09 April 2014 at 10:03pm | IP Logged |
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Just a quick update on my languages this time!
CouchSurfing I went to the CouchSurfing meeting yesterday and it wasn't that great as before. As I said, the best time of the year for the meeting is between December and March, and maybe July/August as well, but now it's kind of a phase in between those, so most foreigners are the ones who already live and work here. There weren't many travellers, so I already knew most of them, and the new ones were from USA and Latin America - not interesting for my language plans right now. Luckily I managed to speak a lot in Italian with 2 Italians who live here, and a lot in French with a friend of mine and his friend, who was born in Haiti but lives in Montreal since his childhood. His French was a little "funny" for me to listen to, but not hard to understand at all. I tried some Japanese with a new guy there, but it was quite noisy and we were in a group, so we went back to Portuguese/English after a couple minutes. Russian I started reading my new bilingual book. Quite hard actually, but the translations help a lot. I'll try to do a little every day. Japanese Tonight I'll have another Italki lesson, to which I'm not prepared! Haha But I'll try to study a little more in the subway and at home before my lesson. Romanian We're gonna have our postponed session tomorrow, at a Japanese restaurant. Again, I'll have to review stuff and study a little bit tomorrow on the subway and maybe at work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4497 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 408 of 439 25 April 2014 at 3:11pm | IP Logged |
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Wow, guys! I haven't been around since before the DNS outage, right? That's too long! A lot has happened in the meantime, so I have a lot to say.
Japanese - Genki I've started doing the final lesson of Genki, lesson 12. So far I've only done the main dialogues copy (yes, I like to copy things to my (paper) notebook in order to learn them better, it usually works best for me). I didn't have much time to move to the vocabulary and grammar points yet, but I'll do it pretty soon, probably this weekend! Japanese - Italki Since my last update I had 2 or 3 Japanese lessons on Italki. They went all greatly, even though I haven't improved so much in terms of grammar, I often find that my vocabulary is improving. What usually happens is that before a lesson I get a little nervous, and I even think of postponing the lesson.... but I go through with it and it always ends up amazingly, with me wanting to do more! Haha I recorded the last 3 lessons for my Add1Challenge last update, but the first 2 times the audio somehow got corrupted, so that you couldn't hear me at all, and the teacher's voice had a huge echo. The 3rd one is perfect, and I'll be editing and uploading it to Youtube any time soon. I'll let you guys know better =) Japanese - Kanji I don't know how long this will last, but I had nothing to do at work yesterday, so I started to use Heiszig's "Remembering the Kanji", and writing down every single Kanji with it's meaning(s). The first 2 lessons are pretty easy, but I'm not sure about how I should continue with it. Just writing it down once or twice will be enough to learn to recognize it? Let's hope! Russian - Interlingua book + Friend About the same as last time. I'm still reading The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Lev Tolstoy, but not as fiercely. As for my wife's friend, she's moved out, but we actually spoke a little in Russian since my last update. The best "levelling-up" for my Russian was in the last CS meeting though! French - Intouchables This amazing movie was on TV last week, so I had to rewatch it! For those who don't know it, I'd definitely recommend it! It's based on a real story about a guy from some French ghetto who, almost by chance, starts working for a very rich tetraplegic man. The French spoken by the ghetto guy is not that easy to comprehend, since he speaks veeeery fast and with a lot of slangs.... the tetraplegic man (who's played by François Cluzet) is easier. I still can't follow French movies without subtitles, but it's always good to have nice "study sessions" that don't even feel like it. Romanian Our second session in Romanian did go as well. I think me and my polyglot friend knew a little more words, but it wasn't the same thing... Our Romanian friend said that we were thinking a lot in Portuguese and using Portuguese structures to speak in Romanian, and in the end we all got a little tired.... I feel like we all have lost our motivation at some level, and this week we won't be having any sessions. Let's see how it goes for the next weeks.... CouchSurfing I've been to 2 CouchSurfing meetings since my last post, and they were both AMAZING! In the first one, I spoke mostly in Portuguese halfway through it, but then started speaking in French and Italian for quite a while, it was fun. Not as fun as the last one though! One of my good Russian friends, who hadn't been there for more than 6 months, finally came back! In the end, we had a group of 5 people (3 Brazilians and 2 Russians) and spent most of the evening speaking in Russian! That was awesome! And then suddenly, a new Japanese guy appeared! At the beginning, I was trying to speak with him in Japanese, but I could only think in Russian, since I had been speaking within our little Russian group the whole evening, but after about 5 minutes of struggling it got a lot easier and we continued speaking for quite a while in a mix of Japanese and Portuguese. He was reaaaally impressed that a Brazilian was speaking Japanese and understanding him, it was fun haha =) Uff! I guess that's it guys! I hope you liked it! See you soon! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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