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Geoffw in TAC2015: RU, HE and Friends | ||
Tags: Football/Soccer | Yiddish | Hebrew | Dutch | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 145 of 251 11 December 2013 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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In conjunction with my SC update above, shortly thereafter I finished HP5 (Dutch), which marks another milestone: I have now
read the entire Harry Potter series in Dutch. Why would I do such a thing? I may never know, but it seems like it's something I can choose to be proud of. In other news, in case you haven't been engrossed yet in the flurry of TAC14 preparation (with weeks to go in TAC13--eerily reminiscent of the inexorable backwards drift of the American holiday shopping season), I've decided that I will be joining two TAC teams for next year: the Dutch team, and the Russian team (both teams with final names still pending). That is not to say that I plan to abandon French; however, I do not have any specific plans for 2014 as regards Italian, at this time. Looking back on this log it should be clear that Italian was always a bit of a side project for me and it looks like it will stay that way for now. As for French, it seems a bit overly ambitious to declare for THREE TAC teams, even if I do plan to keep up with French reading and listening practice. I likely will read and comment on some of the logs of people learning French anyhow. Maybe I should call myself an "observer," taking advantage of this newly invented status? (What is this, the UN?) But so Russian. Well, over ten years ago I bought and read Barry Farber's book (How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and On Your Own). Newly inspired, I set out to learn Russian, doing the things he suggested in his book: acquiring a newspaper in Russian, highlighting unknown words in an article, looking them up, and putting them into flash cards, acquiring as many resources as possible, etc. It was fun, but one way or another I fizzled out eventually. Partly, I didn't really know what to expect in terms of how hard it would be, how long it would take, etc. But I had made a decision that however long it took, I would learn Russian eventually. This decision has been of greater importance to me somehow than any similar commitment to learning a language I studied (for a variety of obscure reasons), and I have never forgotten it. On my current "lifetime must-learn" list, the only languages I haven't at least learned to read well yet are Russian and Modern Hebrew, but I have a pretty good head start on Hebrew (I'm very nearly able to stumble my way through HP1, for example), so it's past time to get my Russian into gear. And the only Hebrew book(s) on my "absolutely must read in the original" list is/are the 5 books of the Torah (i.e., Ancient Hebrew), which I've already read through at least once. Modern Hebrew would be more for speaking than for reading (though I'd like to do both, of course). My Russian "must read" list, on the other hand, has quite a few entries pending. On two separate occasions since then, I have returned briefly to Russian study, but never with anything approaching full commitment. It was more like a walk down memory lane, a nostalgic time to reminisce with my old Russian textbooks. Yeah, übergeekish, I know, but compared to Serpent's professed obsessive love of learning Finnish grammar, this is pretty tame stuff, amirite? ;-) Anyhow, buoyed by my recent successes with French and Dutch (not to mention my improvement in German and my experiences with Yiddish and Italian), I've finally come to believe that this is something I can do and that I will do. For starters, I have several coursebooks, including Assimil (English base, previously did about 25-30 lessons) and TY (which I've previously half-completed). I have an old copy of the Hobbit in Russian, and now I have Wikipedia and Google Translate, which I didn't have before. And above all, I have Harry Potter. Well, not yet, but I'm planning to acquire one or more HP books and plow through them extensively and intensively. I've heard that the first four books were translated terribly, which might not be a big deal for my pedagogical purposes, but it seems like I should at least give a go at book 5, which is reputed to be a great translation. The problem is, I've internalized book 1 (and to a lesser extent, book 2) far more than the other books, which is the whole point of reading Harry Potter instead of something else. However, I just finished reading HP5 in Dutch, and I'll plan to read it in French at the same time, so that the story will be fresh in my mind. I also will prepare by reading through the Russian- language Wikipedia page for the book, which appears to have a simple-language summary of the plot. BTW, this is exactly how I started learning Dutch, though it was probably much easier then, due to the high level of cognates. Perhaps I should rename this my Harry Potter log. (If it aint broke, don't fix it.) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 146 of 251 19 December 2013 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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SUPER CHALLENGE UPDATE - Added French Book entries 23-26
I don't expect I'll be giving any more updates until the end of the year, when I'll add in some partially-complete Italian and French reading to give a better sense of what I actually did. I've long since given up on realistically tracking my German since I don't have a real goal there anyhow, but let's just say there's tons more audio I could log, and a few hundred reading pages. BOOKS (Italian): 3. ... FILMS, ETC. (Italian): 50. COMPLETE BOOKS (French): 23-26. Harry Potter et le prisonnier d'Azkaban FILMS, ETC. (French): 50. COMPLETE BOOKS (Dutch): COMPLETE FILMS, ETC. (Dutch): 50. COMPLETE I am not entered in any Super Challenge for German, but I also am still reporting for my log: BOOKS (German): 25. ... FILMS, ETC. (German): 75. ... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 147 of 251 19 December 2013 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Also happening today in the Harry Potter log, I just came across this website of a guy who taught himself Polish starting with a basic
foundation but no real competence from college classes, and made the leap to actually being competent using...(drum roll)...Harry Potter! I note that, in case there are any Polish learners out there, that eBooks and digital audiobook downloads of the HP series are available at shop.pottermore.com these days. First link, with broad outlines Older post, with more technical details.. I've been reading HP5 for a few days now in both French and Russian, using these techniques more or less for the Russian version. I haven't spent very much time on the "translating" phase, because, as he says, it's a pain. Something I've found relatively effective, but even MORE painstaking, is to "read" and look up every unknown word, and then re-read the previous sentence, paragraph or page until I can read it through without looking any words up and without any huge pauses. This amounts to memorizing the content even more than I already have, and thus providing repeated exposure to the unknown words in a real context. But it can get old. Other strategies have included looking up a topic of interest in Wikipedia (e.g. chess), possibly scanning the English version first, and then see what I can puzzle out from the Russian version. There are lots of helpful pictures, and I can use my knowledge of the subject. For example, when I determine that one section describes the movement rules for chess, I can look at the pictures earlier in the article for the names of the pieces, and now I will know, e.g., the next sentence describes the movement rule for the bishop. What does it say? And when the rules for the rook are the same except that the word "diagonal" has been replaced by something else, well that must mean horizontal. And so on. For some reason words that I learn this way stick WAY better than if I just look them up. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 148 of 251 20 December 2013 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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As I've suggested in the past, I suffer from a low-grade flash card allergy. I briefly
tried on a couple occasions to use flash cards to boost my German vocabulary, but it never took. I even went so far as to install Anki and try to build a deck. Spending so much time on meta-study instead of actually reading, listening, writing or speaking quickly got on my nerves, but I figured it was the most efficient way to learn low- frequency words. But then suddenly, my fledgling Anki deck BROKE! I opened it up and went to review cards, and the front side of each card was blank! I had no idea what had happened...until last night. I figure if I can reach a point where I can clumsily read extensively in Russian from books at about a Harry Potter level, I will have won, and it will be "easy" from there. Faced now with the far more daunting task of learning Russian vocabulary from scratch (minus a few hundred very common words), I decided to give Anki another try. But when I went to add my first card, I got an error message saying that what I had entered would result in a card with a blank face. Hmm. Very suspicious, especially when I'm looking at a text entry field that says "front side*," and it isn't empty. I tried using roman letters instead, but of course that wasn't the problem. * - a white lie, see below It turns out that the card templates were to blame. I must have changed the system-wide language settings of my computer sometime after I installed Anki. Currently, everything is in German, the Anki interface included. But in the card templates, I saw that the tag for "rear side" said "Rückseite," but the tag for front side said "Front Side." And the card preview was showing the front side as "unknown tag" or some such. So I said to myself, "well, what's German for front side?" And when I edited the tags to say "Vorderseite" instead of "front side," everything was fixed! Huzzah. But now I have the (much less) daunting problem that the front side of my cards is in Cyrillic, whereas the back side is in roman letters, and I have to keep switching the input between cards, which adds a ton of mouse movement and clicks to the process. I've just come up with the idea, which I have yet to try out, of first typing ALL words that I'm planning to enter in Cyrillic into a blank text file, and only then switching the input to Latin text and copy-pasting each Cyrillic word in. If that's not much better, I'll try to think of something else. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 149 of 251 23 December 2013 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just happened to be poking around on Khazumoto's blog and I came across a post based on
the following idea: "If you’re ever stuck between two languages, pick the less “useful” one: it’s the one you really want to learn." That's a pretty insightful comment, I have to say. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 150 of 251 27 December 2013 at 12:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Time sensitive note: the annual year-end clearance sale at schoenhofs.com is going on now. Before the new year,
30-50% off in stock items. Sorry, but I already snagged the last copy of Assimil Polonais. However, it looks like they set their prices for the sale and then don't hike them up if they run out, so it might not matter, in case you're interested. I note that at least Catalan sans Peine is marked down to $30, as well as the more popular French with Ease, if I'm not mistaken. Assimil Russian and Dutch might have been marked down, too, so if you were thinking of picking up Assimil, now is the time! EDIT: Free shipping in US for orders over $50. Edited by geoffw on 27 December 2013 at 12:54am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 151 of 251 27 December 2013 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Year in Review
------------ OK, I think it's close enough that I can do my year-in-review now.
French ------ As we can see, I did not meet my "official goal" of changing my French status to "Basic Fluency." My "real goal," however, is harder to measure, because I didn't keep track of hours for too many activities this year. I did, however, put a good number of hours in, certainly over 100, so I'll just say I met this goal. As for my self-assessment of progress according to CEFR, here goes, very rough guess off the top of my head, being as self-critical as possible: Reading: B1+ --> B2 Listening: A2 --> B1+ Writing: A1/A2 --> B1 Speaking: A1/A2 --> A2+ I did almost no speaking this year, but started doing some daily journal writing in French this fall. I don't know if I'm about to start finding room in my life for actually speaking French, but I'm not likely to call myself "basic fluent" anytime soon if I don't. That said, I'm pretty happy with what I did in French this year. I made significant and very noticeable improvement, despite not concentrating too strongly over the course of the year. My original goals when I started French from scratch in April 2011 were to learn to read well enough to use an Assimil course in French, and eventually read classic literature. I've definitely reached the first milestone, and the second milestone isn't too far off. Unless I abandon French reading entirely in 2014, I should be up for wading into some classic literature sometime this year. Italian ----- For Italian, I didn't really make any grandiose goals, and I didn't really make any grandiose progress. I summed it up in the PAX team thread as such: " got to where I could write reasonably well at a "basic conversational" level or so. I've still never done much speaking, so the quick recall isn't really there. In the end, I managed to get to the "basically can read" (I have some 400-500 unlogged reading pages, btw) and "basically can understand radio/tv" stage with a relatively small amount of overall effort. " I don't have any specific plans to keep going with Italian at the moment. Dutch ----- I finished the Half Super Challenge, and I learned how to have a conversation. Giant pile of win. Signed up for TAC2014 team to give myself motivation to keep going a little longer. German ------- I did a good bit of maintenance listening and reading work, I had the occasional conversation, and I wrote journal entries. Very slow but steady improvement. CEFR levels probably not changed, but at this point not backsliding and dropping levels is a victory in my book. Goals for next year in a subsequent post. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 152 of 251 29 December 2013 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is not my goals post. I'm moving the goals post again. ;-)
Having previously used extensive reading of Harry Potter to great success in learning French, Dutch and Italian, I'm now trying to adapt that strategy to my efforts at learning Russian. The obvious problem is the reduced rate of cognates. My procedure thus far has been as follows: 1) Read a page, section, or chapter of the book (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, at present) in French. Not only does this give me more French reading practice, but this is relatively quick, simple and enjoyable, and I get the details of that section of the book reinforced in my short-medium term memory. "Set a bookmark" in the French text (I'm reading on Kindle, so this is automatic). 2) Read the same section in Russian, usually without stopping to look up any words. Some sections are entirely opaque (especially descriptive passages with more advanced vocabulary), some passages are entirely transparent (especially simple dialogue), and some are in between. While reading, I concentrate on guessing and/or discovering the meaning of previously unknown vocabulary from context, from analysis of the word based on other known Russian words, prefixes, and suffixes, and from cognates, and especially trying to recognize words that I have learned recently, so that I can make the transition from knowing a word as an Anki entry to recognizing the word "in the wild." Set a first bookmark in the Russian text. 3) Go back to the other bookmark in the Russian text for the intensive reading phase and read as much as is practical (so far, between half a page and a page), looking up every unknown word that I can't figure out. Write these words down (on paper or in a text file on the computer). If I can't quickly find a good definition (e.g., if I have an irregular form that I don't recognize, a made-up word, a rare word not in the dictionary) just drop it and move on. Set the second bookmark in the Russian text. 4) Create anki cards for each word that survives phase 3 above, and review these at a later time, preferably on a daily basis. 5) At some other time, listen to Russian radio/tv/movies/videos/etc. and listen for stress, pronunciation, and try to pick out as much vocabulary as possible. I'm about 10 days into this protocol so far, and I have about 200 anki entries, of which I've learned 150. I've finished the first three chapters of phases 1 and 2, putting me at page 59 in the Russian. I've finished page 6 of phase 3, which is actually only a total of 4 pages of text. Thus far, I still am, of course, extremely far away from reading comfortably or with any kind of continued high comprehension. However, when I first started it was very rare for me to fully understand a sentence, and mainly I was getting stray words here and there. I've already gotten to having a feel for the flow of the text (e.g., by recognizing nouns, adjectives, clauses, etc.) and I'm recognizing many more words than at the beginning. In dialogue sections especially, I usually can follow pretty well, leveraging my existing knowledge of what the text says based on phase 1. I'd peg my overall hit/miss rate at 40-50% recognized, fluctuating wildly from 10%-90%? At any rate, it's good enough that I can enjoy the effort, and I seem to be making noticeable progress a lot sooner than I expected. I suspect that if I can make it through a month or two of this exercise without burning out, at which point I should have ~1000 anki entries and a couple hundred pages of extensive reading finished, the degree of difficulty should drop noticeably again, and I'll be pretty likely to keep it up for another month or two. We shall see. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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