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TAC 2012 - Team Ne Nur - Hrvatske Krave | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6570 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes  Speaks: EnglishC2*, Norwegian*, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 9 of 76 29 January 2012 at 10:40am | IP Logged | ||
You're not fooling anyone, Philip, I've seen you write good Italian before. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5121 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 76 29 January 2012 at 2:42pm | IP Logged | ||
God, this brings back old, forgotten memories. When I was 17 I did the same thing, and wrote down all the letters and put them up on the wall of the toilet which I shared with the other 4 students at my student dorm. I figured some of them spent so long in there, that they might enjoy learning something. One of my fellow students thought it was brilliant, because since I had drawn up an extra empty rectangle after the last letter, he assumed this was some sort of mathematical riddle, and was really enthusiastic when he could give me the answer. When I told him that there was no answer, that I had just written an empty rectangle to make it look symmetrical, and that this was Braille, he just looked at me like I was a worm, and decided I was a total nerd. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5122 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 11 of 76 29 January 2012 at 3:16pm | IP Logged | ||
Now wait a second, this guy gets excited about a presumed mathematical riddle hanging in a bathroom and yet he calls you a total nerd for being interested in Braille? What a hypocrite. :) Edited by ReneeMona on 29 January 2012 at 3:17pm 3 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 5343 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 12 of 76 29 January 2012 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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Your little dalliance with Braille made me smile today. Don't ask me how, but several years ago I also ended up learning the Braille alphabet in some stolen moment, and even made it a good way into the level 2 abbreviated word list. I then proceeded to walk around all the touristy parts of Cambridge, closing my eyes for an instant, and trying to understand plaques for various commemorative monuments. It didn't stop there either, after fumbling over lifts in random buildings, I finally ended up manhandling packages at the local supermarket (yes, lots of packaging have the product name and best before date in Braille somewhere on the back - food for thought eh? lol). I have to admit though, I had no idea what most of the words said on the plaques, and it was taking me so long to work out what it said on the ready-made meal boxes that I started to attract undue attention from supermarket security. ;) Edited by Teango on 30 January 2012 at 4:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5929 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 13 of 76 29 January 2012 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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@numerodix: Maybe so, but that was back when I could actually claim to speak Italian. If I tried writing in it now, I'm sure you'd seriously regret ever applying the adjective "good" to my Italian.
@Solfrid Cristin: That's brilliant! I love the idea of hanging something like that in a bathroom to give you something to do while you're in there. Since learning the Braille alphabet, I've noticed that there is a poster in my chemistry classroom that shows a message written in Braille and then the "translation" below, which reads: "Which would you rather read? Wear safety goggles!" If given the choice, I would actually prefer to read the Braille, thank you very much, but not for the reason that they're implying. :) @Teango: Your story made me laugh. I'm sure that my friends and I also looked very strange while we were trying to figure out the letters on the plaques outside the school bathrooms -- people would open the door to find us with our faces practically pressed up against the wall next to the door as we scrutinized the dots. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5929 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 14 of 76 05 February 2012 at 10:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week 5: January 28 – February 4
Total Study Time This Period: 25.00 hours Total Study Time in 2012: 62.53 hours I was planning on only writing once every two weeks, but since this week marked the beginning of the 6WC and it was a pretty fantastic week for my language study, I thought it deserved its own update. This week featured a lovely combination of factors which translated into a lot of study time for me. I’m finished with all my college applications, didn’t have much homework, was sick and stayed home from school one day, missed school the next day for a computational linguistics test, school was canceled on Friday due to heavy snowfall, and then there was the start of the 6WC, which is always highly motivating. I believe I’m currently in 36th place for target score (Finnish) and ninth place for total study time. The discrepancy is due to the fact that for the Accelerated Finnish Challenge I’m taking part in, I’m only allowed to study a certain amount of Finnish in the entire month (which is less for me than all the other participants since I’ve studied Finnish in the past), so I’m limited on how much time I can spend on it. I’m hoping that Sprachprofi will let me switch my 6WC target language to Croatian so that I have at least a chance of doing well in the competition… 
 Hrvatski
This Week: 7.42 hours 2012 Total: 13.17 hours I finally spent some quality time on my Croatian this week. I finished the third and fourth lessons in Spoken World Croatian, and then started working through Teach Yourself Complete Croatian and finished the first four lessons in that book. I must say, I don’t particularly like the layout of these new TY “Complete” courses. It wasn’t exactly spectacular in the older versions either, but it was certainly better than this layout. As it is now, I feel like most of each lesson is just empty space with no real content. As I’m go through it, I mostly skim because it’s not worth my time or effort to read all of the fluff that they put in there. As a comparison, the most new vocabulary that I’ve gleaned from any one of the TY Croatian lessons is fewer than 20 words, whereas the most I’ve gotten from a Spoken World Croatian lesson is more than 60 words. Also, I’m a bit confused by the voice actors’ pronunciation in TY Croatian; while I can clearly hear the pitch accent in the recordings for Spoken World and Beginner’s Croatian, I can barely make it out in TY. At first this was actually encouraging because it led me to believe that correctly articulating the pitch accent is not as important as I had thought, but now that I think about it in the context of the course as a whole, I’m wondering if it’s simply that they’re not as good quality of recordings. Alright, rant over.  suomi
This Week: 5.00 hours 2012 Total: 5.87 hours The Accelerated Finnish Challenge has begun! I spent the first two days of the challenge quickly reviewing the first 28 lessons of Le Finnois Sans Peine (which I had completed over the summer) before continuing on to new material. I have now studied up through lesson 33 and am very pleased with how quickly and easily the language is returning to me. I’ve also tried to incorporate more listening practice into my approach to these lessons by turning the “käännös” section into a listening transcription exercise, and I make sure to listen to each lesson at least once without reading the text in order to see if I can pick out everything just by listening. Helmikuussa minun täytyy opiskella vähän suomea, mutta tuo on hyvää, koska olen rakastunut tähän kieliin!  Italiano
This Week: 2.33 hours 2012 Total: 2.5 hours I started working through Assimil’s Perfectionnement Italien this week since I thought that the advanced Assimil course should be a good place to start refreshing my rusty Italian skills. I’ve finished up through lesson five, and though they’re not the most thrilling of lessons to read, they’re still far more interesting than what I was subjected to in La Pratique du Néerlandais last year, and for that I am grateful. At the end of the first lesson it said that the first several lessons would be fairly “simple” so as to help you ease back into the language, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll be treated to exciting texts about Roman history and Renaissance art and architecture later on…  Nederlands
This Week: 1.77 hours 2012 Total: 3.47 hours For my last birthday, I was given a beautiful copy of Harry Potter en de Gevangene van Azkaban by a dear friend. I quickly set about reading the first few chapters…and then almost as quickly got distracted by something shiny and practically forgot about its existence for the next six months. I picked up the book again this week and decided to start reading it again – and to finish it this time. I started over from the beginning and in some stolen time finished the first two chapters. It’s exciting. OTHER On Thursday I took part in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), having had three days’ notice and done a few practice problems at home and while in class. We had three hours to solve eight of these problems on our own. A couple of them on the test were quite challenging, but it was definitely very fun. I suspect that many people on this forum would like solving problems like these, so if you’re bored and don’t feel like studying, you could try your hand at one of the practice problems I linked to above. Anyway, the highest ~100 scorers in the US and Canada will then move on to the international level, which I believe takes place in mid-March. I think we receive our scores by the end of February, and though seriously doubt that I will have made the cut, I can always hope… Edited by ellasevia on 11 March 2012 at 8:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kerrie Senior Member United States justpaste.it/Kerrie2 Joined 5182 days ago 1232 posts - 1740 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 15 of 76 13 February 2012 at 5:20am | IP Logged | ||
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Your Linguistics Olympiad sounds like fun.
I think you've mentioned this before, but I can't find it anywhere. Where/how do you get your flags and your graphs set up like you do? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| LazyLinguist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5390 days ago 105 posts - 125 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 76 13 February 2012 at 6:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Lovely to see you back on the logs again this year Phillip, I always loved reading your
logs and I look forward to every new entry. Also, Good Luck with this Linguistics Olympiad; knowing your usual rate of achievement, you've likely done brilliantly. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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