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TAC 2012 - Team Ne Nur - Throwing pebbles | ||
Tags: 6 Weeks Challenge (6WC) | Dead Languages | Norwegian | Esperanto | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | English | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5117 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 25 of 29 11 April 2012 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Happy belated Easter, everyone! It's been a while since I wrote anything, which is due to a minor burn-out brought on entirely by my own stupidity. You'd think that after having the same thing happen to me several times before, I would have learned not to try to cram thirty hours of study into one week and completely overwork myself but I am extremely pigheaded and it takes a long time for valuable lessons to penetrate my thick skull. Let's hope the complete standstill of my studies over the course of the last four or five weeks (I don't even remember how long it's been) did the trick.
According to my spreadsheet, where I have half-heartedly kept track of the little I've done, I have put in 42,4 hours of study since the last time I updated this log, which means a weekly average of 8,48 hours. That's not quite as bad as I expected, though I should note that this average would have been a lot lower if it hadn't been for my classes forcing me to at least keep up my Esperanto and Old English. Consequently, they are, along with English, the only languages I have something to say about: English English is pretty much the only language I've made considerable progress in since the last time I wrote. As I approached the ending of Emma, I got really into it and finished the last hundred or so pages in one sitting. What I like most about Austen's writing (apart from repressed feelings and desperate declarations of love) is how she is always mocking social conventions and people who adhere to them in a way that still feels very relevant in our time. I've always loved the Regency period and reading about what people's lives were like back then, but at the same time I think it's fascinating that characters from that period should still be so recognizable to me today. Apart from Emma, I have also finished The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald for the second time (it's fast becoming one of my favorite novels) and I've started in Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, which I am not liking at all so far because the characters are dull and the plot seemingly nonexistent. However, the introduction to the book made it sound like it was quite an important feminist work so I'm giving it a little more time to become interesting before moving on to something else. Ænglisc My Old English midterm was two weeks ago which means that my class is now moving on to Middle English and I'm on my own with OE. Unfortunately, the test was an open book one, which to me is just code for "no studying required", so there's still a lot of memorizing to be done if I want to get even close to an actual level of proficiency. While I don't have my grade back yet, I felt quite good about the test and I can still bring in questions for my professor every week, should I need it, so it's time to dust off my Teach Yourself book and see how I fare on my own. Esperanto As I expected, I did a bit better on my second test because this time, I was smart enough to actually study the grammar. We're studying the language in a very theoretical way (with tiny bits of practice sprinkled in to periodically remind ourselves or our pitiful active skills) which also means we get very theoretical questions about the grammar on the exam. I hadn't anticipated that last time so I only got a 7,3 because I completely bungled the last question. For the midterm, I had studied the grammar and I got an 8,5 but I made a lot of silly mistakes in my translation so there's still plenty of room for improvement. As indicated by my grades, the class is going quite well. I find that I have become one of the most vocal students in the room, to the extend that I sometimes don't answer a question from the professor because I've already answered the last two and I don't want to be that annoying kid who claims all of the teacher's attention for herself. Since I'm normally the quiet frantically note-taking girl in the back of the class who wouldn't raise her voice if the building was on fire, it's quite a strange position to be in, though not at all unpleasant. Fortunately, being back on the forum and writing this post has, for the first time in ages, inspired me to make a list of requirements for this week and get some serious studying done so here's hoping that I'll be back to my studious self in time for next week's update. --------------------------------------------------------- @ Solfrid: I have been a huge Austen fan for years but all of my interests (commonly called obsessions by those who know me well) come and go in waves so that's what I meant by not being in the mood for Austen. Reading Emma brought on a major Austen-wave this time and in fact, I loved it so much that I think it may now seriously rival Pride and Prejudice for my favorite Austen novel. In thirty years I'll be 51, which is still a little young to live in a nursing home, but I would love to work there until I'm old enough to move in. I would organize multilingual karaoke nights and design-your-own-language workshops. I think I'll pass on the Salsa dancing, though. I'll be much too busy reading my yellowed Assimil books through horn-rimmed glasses. Or maybe I'll have Alzheimer's by then, and I'll be the ideal language partner because I'll have forgotten all languages except Dutch and I won't mind having the same conversations over and over again. @Tarvos: Thank you. Dreaming up their own words and not many loanwords sounds excellent! I haven't actually began studying Hebrew yet but I plan to start on Pimsleur this week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5117 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 26 of 29 02 May 2012 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Weeks 15, 16 & 17: April 8 – April 28
Total these weeks: 28.97 hours Total 2012: 235.29 hours I'm writing this update a little later (understatement) than I intended but since today is the start of two exciting new challenges, I'm going to pretend I planned it exactly this way. After my last update, I had two reasonably good weeks (around twelve hours each) but then slacked off again last week. And yet, I have almost reached the 250 hour-mark and my daily average still hovers around 2 hours. I don't know how I do that but I suppose my lazy-spells and active-spells are just very nicely-balanced. My main problem this last week was that every time I thought of a good book to read or film to watch, I felt I had to save it for the Super Challenge so I ended up so fixated on today that I kind of forgot to study in between. Another problem is that I've been feeling a little overwhelmed and confused by all the languages I'm supposed to be studying (I was never was very good at multitasking) so I've dropped several of them for the time being, in order to focus on what's really important to me now; the 6WC (Norwegian) and the Super Challenge (French and English). My intention to study Hebrew has been a disaster so far because the class I take on it keeps getting cancelled (we've only had one class in the last four weeks) so my motivation is basically non-existent at this point. Pretty much the same goes for Old English, though I'm determined to keep that one as a target language because I plan to study it for the next 6 week challenge in August. Français These weeks: 14.52 hours 2012: 99.19 hours How can I have spent 14 hours studying a language and yet have absolutely nothing of note to write about? I barely even remember anything I've done. I've watched some films (all dubbed because I'm lazy) and I've started reading a crime novel that was recommended to me by my French exchange partner. I'm normally not really into crime fiction but I quite like this one and it's easy to read so I've decided it will be the first book I read for the Super Challenge. Speaking of the SC, I had originally entered with only French but since I want to keep reading in English and Dutch alongside French, and I can't see this happening if I have to plough through five books every month, I've decided I'm only going to read fifty books and watch 100 films. I think if I manage to stick with this, it will still be a significant achievement. English These weeks: 2.45 hours 2012: 29.33 hours As with French, I have decided to read 50 books and watch 100 films in English as part of the Super Challenge. I don't think I will benefit from the films as much as from the books but since cinema is another hobby of mine that has been shamelessly neglected in the two years since I started studying languages, I'm seeing this part of the challenge as a good opportunity to watch some of the many classic films I have never seen. Deutsch These weeks: 7.51 hours 2012: 26.69 hours I have been neither motivated nor inspired to do much about German so all I've been doing is listening to my Harry Potter audio book. The annoying thing about German (or rather, one of the many annoying things about it) is that my motivation to study it occurs sporadically and in very small but intense amounts, so trying to make motivation coincide with actual studying feels a little bit like playing that game where you have to use to hammer to hit a bunch of unspecified rodents that keep popping up out of holes in the ground. Esperanto These weeks: 6.03 hours 2012: 58.85 hours To everyone's surprise, and mine most of all, my grades keep improving as the material gets harder. After a 7,4 and an 8,5, I got a 9 on my most recent test, which consisted of only translations and no grammar question, which may in part account for my high grade. On the two previous tests, I made many of the same careless mistakes like messing up verb tenses, passive/active and determiners so I tried to pay extra attention to these points this time around. After I finished all my translations, I went over them another three or four times (normally I can't even be bothered to check them at all), each time playing close attention to one grammatical stumbling block so I'm really eager to see what kind of mistakes I still made. My final test is in two or three weeks (I can't believe we're that close to the end of the semester already) and I plan to study my tail off so I can reach an intermediate level from where I can then continue studying on my own. Norsk Today: 3.45 hours Six Week Challenge! As always, the start of a new challenge has motivated me and it doesn't hurt that I'm loving Norwegian so far. It's so familiar and yet so different. I started by learning some basic stuff like pronouns and common verbs and reading a summary of the grammar. It feels a little bit weird to be starting from absolute scratch and to have to learn basic words like 'I' and 'no' but I quite like it, and of course it's all so transparent that it isn't exactly hard. The only part I'm struggling with a little is the pronunciation, because my intonation is all over the place and everything I say sounds just a little bit off, which is maddening. The pronunciation of jeg for instance. I used to think it sounded exactly like the Dutch jij but on closer inspection, it seems to be very subtly different, more like an -aj sound. In fact, it sounds kind of like the dialectal pronunciation of -ij that I always try very hard to avoid, so let's hope my attempts to pronounce it in Norwegian don't rub off on my Dutch. Because I anticipated that pronunciation would be a major difficulty, I decided to use Pimsleur as an introduction because I thought the endless hammering on pronunciation, which normally bores me to death, might come in handy in this case. Like I said, I'm not normally a fan of Pimsleur and I don't think I've ever even made it beyond lesson three without resorting to skipping large parts of the lessons but I kind of like it so far. I've done two lessons just today so I hope I can keep up that pace and finish the first level in two weeks. Edited by ReneeMona on 27 May 2012 at 9:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5338 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 27 of 29 02 May 2012 at 2:12am | IP Logged | ||
Whac-a-mole - I know just how you feel with German. (I must admit though that this nostalgic colourful image made me laugh out loud just now and probably wake up the neighbours. ;) ) Good luck with making swift progress in Norwegian for this 6WC, as well as keeping up with all these other interesting languages on your menu! Edited by Teango on 02 May 2012 at 2:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ReneeMona Diglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 5117 days ago 864 posts - 1274 votes Speaks: Dutch*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 28 of 29 22 June 2012 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Weeks 18 - 24: April 29 – June 16
Total these weeks: 90.46 hours Total 2012: 327.48 hours More than a month has elapsed since my last update and in five or six weeks, I have made some considerable progress. May was the most successful month of the year in terms of study time, which is pretty good considering I've been quite busy with school. June (or rather the last three or four weeks), has not been very promising so far but that's because I've been so busy with my finals and the million administrative hurdles I've had to jump at the end of the semester and also because my boss seems to equate no classes with more time to work (and I equate more work with more money and am therefore the only one out of the two of us with a correct equation, which is why I don't protest). Anyway, the last few weeks have been all about settling into the Super Challenge and realizing I've set an insanely unrealistic goal for myself but I've decided to hang in there because I like the clear focus the challenge gives me, as well as the chance to make neat lists of all the books I've read and films I've watched. Good administration is a huge motivating factor for me. Français These weeks: 52.49 hours 2012: 151.67 hours The book my exchange partner recommended to me turned out to be an excellent choice for my first Super challenge book. It being a crime novel, it didn't matter very much if I missed a word here and there or didn't fully comprehend a sentence, because all that meant was that the story was shrouded in a little bit more mystery than intended. I read quite slowly at the beginning but about half-way through, everything became very suspenseful and exciting so I finished the second half in a matter of days. The book was called Debout les morts by Fred Vargas and I am considering reading more from this writer, partly because my local bookstore had a whole bunch of other books written by her. For my second book, I read the second instalment of the Hunger Games trilogy, L'embrasement by Suzanne Collins. I read the first book in English ages ago but I didn't really want to spend so much time reading the two sequels in English when I have so much other reading to do, so I read it in French and it turned out to be a very good choice because it was written in a simple enough style but with enough unknown words and expressions to make it worth my while. I initially copied and collected all the unknown words I found, just like I did for Debout les morts, in order to translate them and put them into Anki at some later time, but I abandoned this practice when the Word file where I collected them grew several pages long and I realized I would never have the time and patience to go through all those words anyway. So, when I was a couple of chapters into L'embrasement, I deleted the whole file and just kept a tab with Google translate open while reading to look up unfamiliar words straightaway and hope that the context would be enough to have them settle in my mind somewhere. As it turns out, the words do register somewhere in the back of my brain because I usually recognize them the next time they pop up, so the time-consuming practice of collecting words, translating them and putting them into Anki, which always takes several hours per week, has officially been abandoned. Like I mentioned, I've been struggling (and failing) with the pace of reading required to finish five books in a month, but I'm hoping that once all the pesky loose ends of this semester have been neatly tied up, I'll be able to reserve a standard amount of time each day for reading. Most importantly, I'll have to learn to squeeze some studying/reading into every spare moment I have to myself, which I am not very good at because I like to be able to sit down behind my desk and devote several hours to languages because it's just neater and more fun that way. To practice study-squeezing, I've been bringing my SC books to work so now some of my co-workers are complaining that I have become rather dull during my breaks. Thankfully, I am charming enough during the remainder of the day to still stay in their good books, even though my enthusiastic explanation of the idea of the Super Challenge made the majority of them look at me as if I had sprouted an extra head. I also had another meeting with my exchange partner, which served as an unpleasant reminder of how deplorably bad my speaking skills are. This is especially frustrating because when I am speaking to a non-native speaker, say my mother or myself, I am able to string sentences together with some degree of fluency and even occasionally muster an ounce of elegance. But for some reason, you put me in a conversation with a native speaker (or anyone the least bit intimidating) and my usually passable accent completely disappears, I can’t remember words I would know if I were writing, I suddenly mess up the simplest grammar rules and second-guess every syllable I utter. In short, I’m reduced to an unimpressive mumbling mess. Sometimes I wonder how I ever managed to get through this stage in English but I simply can't remember, because it was either too long ago or I wasn't paying attention. What surprises me most is how my friend doesn't seem the least bit annoyed or unwilling to listen to my stammering, which tells me that she is either very patient and forgiving or a terrific actress. In her place, I think I would have grown sick of hearing myself stammer and stutter but you won't hear me complain. English These weeks: 7.48 hours 2012: 36.75 hours Two months ago, I was reading Little Women and found it excessively boring so when May rolled around and I hadn't read from it in a while, I decided to not waste any more time on it and start on a new book. The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway, of course) started out not very promising either because I kept waiting for a plot of some kind and the copious details and descriptions of Paris were very irritating. But even so, I never found the book boring because it has a great pace and it became very intriguing towards the end once I read up on the author and the context it was written in. After finishing it, I actually really liked it so I have put The Old Man and the Sea on my reading list for the Super Challenge. As my second book for last month, I read George Orwell's Animal Farm, which I chose specifically because it's so short that I could easily finish it in an afternoon. Since then, I've started on Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which I was a little scared of because I was afraid Hardy would be another one of those stuffy 19th century writers, but to my surprise and relief, his style is actually quite engaging and the plot is intriguing right off the bat. Esperanto These weeks: 8.3 hours 2012: 67.15 hours The final test for my Esperanto course was towards the end of May and I got an 8,6 on it, which left me with a final grade of 8,4/10. Considering that the course is worth 10 EC's and I sort of breezed through it, I am very satisfied with this result. The only complaint I had about it was that by the end of the semester, we had basically covered the exact same material that I learned in a twelve-lesson course in a matter of days. Of course, we went a little bit deeper into the history and grammar of the language and I won't say I learned nothing at all, but for ten EC's and with three hours a week, I think we could have covered a lot more. Since I had so much grammar-cramming to do before the test, I decided to defer all extracurricular activities I was in the middle of (reading La eta princo, watching a course on YouTube, etc) until after I had taken the course and finished all my other coursework for this semester. Now that I'm on my own again and free to decide my own course, I can already feel the motivation building up again so once this final week of course work is over, I plan to get back to those activities and establish some weekly habits so I can keep making progress. Deutsch These weeks: 5.89 hours 2012: 32.57 hours I finished listening to the audio book of Harry Potter und die Kammer des Schreckens a couple of weeks ago and in hindsight, it was surprisingly helpful. During the last couple of CDs, I found myself getting quite used to the points of grammar that used to confound me because they're different from Dutch. I also learned quite a bit of vocab from it because some words occurred in the book so often that I ended up knowing them instead of just guessing what they mean based on my obsessive familiarity with the book. Norsk These weeks: 16.37 hours 2012: 16.37 hours I didn't twitter (or is the verb tweet?) any of my sparse study sessions after the first or second week of the challenge because I've been so busy with school that Norwegian slipped quite a few places down on my list of priorities. Of course, I knew that was going to happen because it is very unwise of me to make such a big time commitment as the six week challenge during what is by far the busiest time of the year for me but I've never been known to be wise or to learn from my mistakes. In fact, I've started to doubt whether the concept of the 6WC is really all that effective for me. Except for the August challenge, all of them take place during really unfortunate times of the year (two end-of-semesters and one beginning-of-semester), which means I always end up spreading myself too thin and because of the low-level requirement, I am always tempted to take up new languages when I have neither time nor a particularly strong desire to do so. On top of that, I've come to the realization that unlike an apparently large number of people on the forum, I study best when I have no one to account to but myself. I love making up my own schedules and plans and I've started seeing all these challenges as more of an intrusion into my own plans than as a fun competition. The intense focus on challenges and competitions that has been present on the forum of late has me feeling kind of overwhelmed and disillusioned with it all, especially because I feel like it has changed the overall tone of the forum to something quite different from the way it was when I first joined two years ago. So I had this epiphany towards the beginning of the challenge and decided to retreat into my introversion-cave, where I've been doing absolutely nothing on Norwegian at all, which is very unfortunate because I actually managed to convince my parents to go to Oslo at the end of this month, which I'm super excited and thrilled about. We're leaving in a matter of days so some major last-minute Norwegian cramming might be in order except I probably won't have time for that because I am being haunted by a huge essay that I still have to finish (or make that start) writing before we leave. As for my actual studying, that was actually going quite smoothly back when I still had time to do it. Because I was having some trouble remembering verbal conjugations (since there are so few I decided to just add all of them onto the Anki-cards) I spent something like four hours (I was surprised at my own stamina) going over them all and writing them all down dozens of times, and after a while I started recognizing patterns in the past tense and participles, and spotting fun German-Dutch-Norwegian love triangles of Germanicness (and by that I mean cognates). I also practiced some key phrases with one of my co-workers who studied in Oslo for two years and I now have it officially confirmed that my pronunciation sucks because when I remarked that god dag sounds kind of like "good dog", she answered "yeah, that's because your pronunciation sucks". Yay for me! Right before the start of the challenge, I happened to find a wonderful collection of materials for Norwegian, including a whole bunch of promising-looking courses and some dubbed films (studying Norwegian is finally making me realize how frustrating it must be for Dutch students to only have dubbed children's movies at their disposal. I fear French has spoiled me in that regard). Thanks to my own amazing googling skills, I also found all seven Harry Potter audio books which is wonderful because going to a country I've never been to before = buying the local translation of Harry Potter, so I'm looking forward to using those for L-R-ing at some far-off point in the future when I can actually understand a full sentence. --------------------------------------------------------- @ Teango: Thanks for the encouragement. I haven't been keeping up with my languages very well these last few weeks but after I return from Norway, I will finally have all my time to myself again so I'll hopefully be able to get back to my languages because these last few weeks have been dismal. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5116 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 29 of 29 23 June 2012 at 11:37am | IP Logged | ||
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Love reading your updates as always! Send me a PM about when you are coming, I would love to invite you and your parents for a visit over to my rose garden, which is starting to look quite nice. And I am so much looking forward to meeting you! Normally I live a 10 minutes' train ride from the center, but since they are closing down the railway system for 6 weeks now, it is half an hour's bus ride, but that should still be feasible.
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