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Ellasevia TAC 2013 – Teams Divan and Alef | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5938 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 17 of 24 25 January 2013 at 2:39am | IP Logged |
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Alright, an update here is long overdue. I've been meaning to write something for over a week and it still hasn't happened, and I'm off to Zagreb again tomorrow for the weekend, so I thought I should get it out of the way before another three days pass and I get behind on my studies.
As of right now I am almost perfectly on track -- actually a bit ahead -- according to my time-based goal for this year. Thus far I have spent nearly 37 hours on language study, though admittedly over 14 of those were spent only on daily Anki reviews. The languages that have received the most attention are Croatian, Spanish, and German at about 8 hours each. Of course, I've spent more time on those that I didn't count -- I speak Croatian here every day, use Spanish and German to talk to friends, and have German classes at school.  HRVATSKI
In terms of actual Croatian study, I have browsed through lessons 7-11 of Beginner's Croatian. I didn't find much of anything I didn't already know, though I "formally" learned some things that I had already figured out on my own from daily exposure to the language. I also started reading Mali Princ and have so far read the first seven chapters. This week I finally found out where the public library is in Opatija, so I've gone there a couple times and it's a wonderful resource in that it has so many books in Croatian. So far I've only tried reading a small book of Croatian fairy tales, but I'm sure I'll find much more material there in the future. I haven't done any work with Assimil, but I'm not sure it would be worth my time anyways since I doubt there would be much unknown material at this point. Still, I probably should get my money's worth out of it since it was quite expensive, so I may eventually decide to quickly finish it off.  ESPAÑOL
Aside from some Anki reviews, there hasn't been any actual Spanish study. I've just been rewatching some episodes of the Spanish series El Internado, so the hours piled up quickly.  DEUTSCH
I've spent a fair amount of time reading Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen. It's no trouble at all to read, and though there are still plenty of unknown words, there are only a few that I can't understand from context. Except for one or two chapters which read intensively, looking up most or all of the new words, I've been reading extensively, and only writing down words which particularly interest or bother me. I should definitely be able to finish the book by the end of the month.  فارسی
I've spent about 5 hours on Persian so far, which is less than I'd hoped for but a start nonetheless. I've so far listened to the first nine episodes of the podcast Chai and Conversation, as well as having reviewed lessons 4-7 of Assimil and the first two lessons of Spoken World Farsi. If I concentrate a bit more in the next week I should be able to reach my goals for this month.  NEDERLANDS
I've spent about 4.5 hours on Dutch so far, solely (aside from Anki reviews) on the DutchPod101 translations that I work on together with Sprachprofi. There should be a nice increase in this study time as I have a backload of translations right now, which I plan on doing on the bus to Zagreb tomorrow. I haven't yet done any actual study, though, so I doubt this month's goals will be reached.  日本語
I've also spent a little over 4 hours on Japanese so far, mostly on studying kanji. At this point I have restudied up through #400 in the RTK queue and should easily get to #500 by the end of January. I additionally listened to a couple episodes of JapanesePod101, though I still have to find a series that is suitable to my level since the one I was previously using is too advanced for me now that my Japanese has gotten so unbelievably rusty.  KISWAHILI
I have only spent a little over 2 hours on Swahili so far this year, which is much less than I had hoped for. I need to put quite a bit more effort into this language if I expect to make any progress. I have so far reviewed lessons 2 and 3 of Spoken World Swahili, but nothing else. To my credit, the Mwana Simba website appears to have some sort of virus, or in any case my computer won't let me access it, so that's why I haven't done anything on that front. But I do have the Assimil course for Swahili, so I can most definitely start working on that.  ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΑ
I have done a pathetically small amount with Greek, only about an hour and a half, most of which is from Anki reviews. I watched part of one episode of the Greek travel show Γυρίσματα before deciding I didn't like it and deleted that goal. I might give it another chance, but either way, it doesn't explain why I still haven't touched Ο Αλχημιστής this month. Seriously, I've been reading that damn book on and off for like a year and a half, it's about time I finished it already.  MAGYAR
Wait, Hungarian? Um, yeah, about that. I decided yesterday to exchange Finnish for Hungarian for a number of reasons. There's a possibility I may visit Hungary sometime in the coming months, there are lots of Hungarian tourists who come to Croatia and I often (well...sometimes) see signs and product labels written in Hungarian. This is in contrast to my Finnish, which I had spent no time on so far this year aside from Anki reviews, don't have many opportunities to use, and hasn't really been calling to me recently. Also, I just really wanted to study some Hungarian, and at this point any reason that gets me studying languages is a valid reason. I have Assimil's Hungarian With Ease, and have so far completed the first two lessons. At this point I can say such thrilling things as Budapest nagy és szép város, és ott magyarok vannak (Budapest is a big and beautiful city, and there are Hungarians there) and Mi franciák vagyunk és franciául beszélünk (We are French and speak French). I wanted to do more than just those first two lessons and discover more of this fascinating new language, but have decided to make this a proper Assimil experiment, meaning that I'll actually follow their guidelines for once (ie, one lesson per day, passive and active waves, etc.). This is just for fun, so let's see what happens. :)  FRANÇAIS
French is the only language I haven't yet touched on here, and I have so far this year done nothing for this language except Anki reviews. I really should start putting on a French radio program or something to listen to in the background while I do mindless things on the computer... ---- @Solfrid Cristin and @Chung: I'm still trying to figure out a way to express all of the things I take issue with in the Croatian school system without being offensive, but once I do I'll PM both of you my thoughts. :) @Sprachprofi: Thanks! Hopefully I'll see you in either Köln or Budapest later this year. And I'll get on those Dutch translations tomorrow, since I'll be on the bus for a couple hours and will have nothing else to do. ;) EDIT: I noticed some horrifying mistakes in my English, and I apologize in advance if there are any others. Living abroad is making my English awful. My English teacher (because I have to take English as a foreign language here) was making fun of me when I got some answers wrong on a simple exercise we were doing in class today because I didn't know some British expressions, and told me (jokingly, I hope) that I need to work harder on my English. Edited by ellasevia on 25 January 2013 at 2:47am 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 5352 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 18 of 24 17 March 2013 at 8:51am | IP Logged |
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Howzit, braddah? I can't believe you have to take compulsory English lessons along with everything else (lol). I imagine your Croatian must have advanced in leaps and bounds by now, and I look forward to your next update when life throws you a free hour.
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| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5938 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 19 of 24 22 March 2013 at 12:11am | IP Logged |
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I can't believe it has already been almost two months since I last wrote here! I would say that I've been busy, but that wouldn't be quite true -- I've been in that strange state of feeling busy although you aren't, if that makes sense. Around the last time I updated here, I realized that I only had 5 months -- 23 weekends -- left in Croatia, and wanted to do as much as possible before I return home.
In terms of travel within Croatia, I've been back to Zagreb twice and am going again on Saturday. I also spent a weekend up north, in the towns of Varaždin and Ivanec. On Monday I'm heading down south to the gorgeous coastal city of Dubrovnik for a few fun, hopefully warm and sunny days. As for travel outside of Croatia, I took a day trip to Venice at the beginning of February. It was my second time in Italy, and I still can't believe that I live somewhere where it's even possible to make a day trip to Italy. I love Europe. :) Unfortunately, I did not speak any Italian -- I actually spoke more Croatian than Italian since I automatically greet and thank people in Croatian all the time now -- but I will be back in Italy in June, for several days this time, so maybe I'll be inspired to refresh some of my knowledge of Italian. I may also find myself reviewing my Hungarian and Romanian in the near future, because if all works out I'm hoping to spend some time in Budapest and Timișoara in late April. I haven't actually done any substantial language study in the past two months, despite the vast amount of free time that I have during the school week when I'm not traveling. The languages I spent the most time on were unsurprisingly the ones I had native materials for -- Spanish, German, Dutch, and Croatian. For Spanish, I watched some Spanish TV (which I should do more of, since my Spanish is starting to get rusty again), while in German I finally finished reading Harry Potter and began rereading the third book in Dutch (I started reading it over a year ago, but never got past the first 100 pages, so I simply started from scratch this time). For Croatian, aside from speaking it all the time every day, I read a little bit of Mali Princ and watched some TV shows. In terms of Persian and Swahili, I listened to a few more Chai and Conversation podcasts, and completed several lessons from both Spoken World Persian and Swahili. Additionally, my new host brother has expressed an interest in learning some Swahili, so I've been giving him some lessons in the basics. Sadly, my attempt at Hungarian was short-lived and didn't survive the interruption in my daily study routine that was my day trip to Venice a week into the experiment. However, it did revive my desire for Finnish. Why? Well, I suppose the simplest explanation would be because I realized that all of the things that seemed hard in Hungarian I already knew in Finnish. Furthermore, I've been practicing a bit with the Finnish girl who is on exchange in Zagreb. I may only be able to say basic things and they take me forever to figure out how to say properly and I mangle them when I finally do get them out of my mouth, but at least I'm practicing. I actually stayed with her this past weekend in Zagreb, and the two of us were able to so convincingly speak no Croatian or English, only Finnish, that we got out of having to pay for the tram when a ticket inspector came aboard. And now for a disorganized ramble about Croatian: As for improvement in my Croatian, I'm not usually conscious of it it until I realize that I know and use words that I've never "learned", or until I realize that there's a "best" or "most native-like" way to say something. That's it hits me that I've made a lot of progress. When I was in Zagreb last weekend, several natives complimented me on my Croatian, saying that if I hadn't already told them I was American they would have assumed I was Croatian. I don't know if they were completely serious, but I'll take the compliment. :) Similarly, when some people from Serbia came to stay with my old host family for Carnival (Rijeka, the nearest big city to where I live, is specifically known for its Carnival celebrations), my host family passed me off to them as their real son, and the Serbians suspected nothing until my host father asked them to guess what country I was from -- to which they responded that they didn't understand the question because they thought I was from Croatia. Again, not entirely sure if that was because I spoke Croatian well or because my host family had been pretending I was their real son and it was only logical that I'd be from Croatia, but either way it was a nice ego boost. Something interesting I've observed lately is that when I listen to people speak, I'll occasionally notice a new grammatical feature which I hadn't been aware of before. I'll then start to hear it everywhere and can't believe I never noticed it before, and soon I'll be using it myself. That's one of the great things of learning by immersion -- you can truly discover the language yourself, rather than having a book hand-feed it to you. Edited by ellasevia on 22 March 2013 at 12:36am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4503 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 20 of 24 22 March 2013 at 8:20am | IP Logged |
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Hey Ellasevia, I'm interested in doing Swahili at some point and I got the whole FSI
course (I have good experiences with FSI Swedish). Are there any other materials you can recommend? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5938 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 21 of 24 13 June 2013 at 12:39am | IP Logged |
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It's been an inexcusably long time since I've written here, and it has been over a month since I visited the forum at all. I've been incredibly busy since the middle of April, mainly because of massive amounts of travel. Since April I've been in 14 different countries all over Europe, and so any free time I've had has been spent lying down and recovering from all the exhausting travel. I bought a new pair of shoes a little over a month ago, and already they're almost completely worn out and on the verge of falling apart from all the walking I've done all over the place.
My first trip was to Budapest, Hungary and Timișoara, Romania for 8 days. I absolutely loved Budapest and it definitely ranks among my favorite cities that I've visited in Europe, and the world. Not only was it beautiful, but it also had a very inviting atmosphere that made it a very pleasant place to be. I crash-course studied a bit of Hungarian on the train ride from Zagreb, and while in Budapest I enjoyed challenging myself by using the little Hungarian I knew as often as possible and trying to decipher the words on the signs based on what I knew of the language. From Budapest I took the train to Timișoara, and thankfully made it there alive and without any setbacks. I say that because I feel like I could have been robbed and/or murdered on the train, because after the stop in Arad a man came into my compartment, and through my limited Romanian I was able to understand him saying something about how people are sometimes killed on trains in Romania, how he snuck onto this train and hid in the bathroom while the ticket controllers came around because he lives in the train station in Timișoara, and how people in Romania will kill you for money or food...and that he was hungry. I was so thankful when we arrived in Timișoara and my friend and her boyfriend were waiting for me on the platform right outside the train doors, because the man followed me off the train. As you can imagine, that experience was a very warm welcome to Romania. Aside from that, though, I didn't have any other trouble while I was there and it was very nice to visit with my friend again after three years. Timișoara was a nice city, and reminded me of Greece for some reason, but there was no way it could live up to the high standard I had after having been in Budapest. I did get to practice a little Romanian while I was there, and was pleased that I could understand almost everything I saw written in Romanian. The spoken language was a different story, however. Because of its Slavic sound and multitude of Slavic loanwords, I kept accidentally listening to it as if it were Croatian and would understand nothing as a result. The next trip was a two-week tour around several of the countries of the former Yugoslavia with my grandfather and his friend, who were visiting. We started in Ljubljana, Slovenia and drove north through the Julian Alps, and then turned southward toward Croatia. We began in Istria and gradually worked our way all the way down the coast and hopping across to a few islands to Dubrovnik, and even down into Montenegro for a day. Their flight was out of Zagreb, so we spent two days in Bosnia and Herzegovina on the way back to Zagreb from Dalmacija. We also briefly visited northern Croatia and the region of Zagorje before finally ending in Zagreb, and then I returned home to Lovran. It was interesting seeing so much of Croatia, and some of the other ex-Yugoslav countries in such a short time; I had been to many of the places we visited in Croatia (and Ljubljana) before, but seeing them all in such quick succession made for interesting comparisons. I think the most interesting part of the trip was our stay in Bosnia, in Mostar and Sarajevo. Crossing into Bosnia from Croatia is like suddenly stepping into a Middle Eastern country while still staying in Europe. It's strange how completely different and yet the same the Bosnian culture is from that of Croatia, and was especially odd hearing a Slavic language in a Muslim country. I'd love to go back to Bosnia and Herzegovina because two days weren't nearly enough to scratch the surface of that fascinating country. Now I just need to properly visit Slavonija and Serbia (and Macedonia and Kosovo too, I suppose), and then I will have seen all of the former Yugoslavia. The final trip was with all of the exchange students -- about 95 of us -- stationed in Austria, Croatia, and Bosnia around Western Europe for two and a half weeks. We started out in Linz, Austria and visited Germany, Belgium, France, Andorra, Spain, Monaco, and Italy before ending in Bregenz, Austria, on the border with Switzerland. I made an effort to speak some of the local language everywhere we visited, as much as I was able -- except in Andorra and Barcelona, where I just used Spanish instead of the preferred Catalan. It was really cool to see Catalan used so officially there (and likewise with Dutch in Belgium), since I had never been anywhere where it was spoken before. I had heard that in Barcelona and Catalonia in general, people don't like to use Spanish and insist on using Catalan, but I didn't find that to be the case at all and had no trouble using Spanish while I was there. I'd love to go back to Barcelona, as it was my favorite city out of where we went on the tour, and like Budapest, had a very friendly atmosphere about it. Part of that was definitely the weather, though -- Barcelona was the first place where we actually had sunny, warm weather most of the time, since it had rained all the way through Germany, Belgium, half of France, and Andorra. We even had torrential rain in Tuscany, where it's known for being hot and dry -- damn these European floods! Anyways, it was a lovely, albeit tiring, trip, and interesting to switch from one language zone to another every couple days. I must say I'm glad to be back home in Croatia now, though. As of now, I have a little over a month left in Croatia before having to return to the United States to face real life. My parents and brother are coming to visit in about two weeks, so then I get to go on another whirlwind tour of Croatia with them -- I could be a tour guide for some of these places by now -- and then to northern Italy for 10 days. From there we will return to Zagreb and then fly home together...an inconceivable thought for me right now. I'm really not doing anything with my languages right now and most of them, except for Croatian, are continuing to stagnate and get continually rusty. I suppose in a way I'm intentionally letting them all fall apart so that I can start afresh later on once I've gotten everything figured out. In August I'll begin my university studies and I'm currently trying to decide whether I should take Chinese or Russian as my foreign language, or if I should take a foreign language at all this next year. So many decisions... That's all for now. Hopefully I'll remember to write here again before the end of the year, and maybe with some success stories too. :) I hope everyone is doing well! 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5145 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 22 of 24 17 June 2013 at 7:41pm | IP Logged |
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Good to hear that you're still making the most of your time in Europe. I'm sure you'll look back on it as one of the best years of your life. As a Hungarian and Hungary lover, I'm pleased to read that you loved your time there.
Personally I hope you do take a foreign language next year and hope it's Russian. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5938 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 23 of 24 31 December 2013 at 9:01am | IP Logged |
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Oh goodness! I can't believe it's already the end of the year. Unfortunately, I don't have much to report as far as languages are concerned, but I'm (perhaps naively) hoping that 2014 will be more productive.
Since I last posted in June, I returned the to the United States from my year abroad in Croatia. It was very painful for me to leave my new friends and host families, and what I had begun to consider my new home. I have every intention of returning to Croatia just as soon as I can, and am currently in the process of planning a trip for this upcoming summer. Sadly, as I no longer use Croatian 24/7, my active skills in the language have weakened somewhat. I find myself now forgetting words that were second nature to me while I was in Croatia, and my speaking isn't quite as fluent. That said, I feel as though my writing has somehow continued to improve and become more idiomatic. I would like to think that the same could be said for my speaking skills, if only I had the opportunity to practice speaking Croatian more often. Still, Croatian is one of my strongest languages after English, on par with (or perhaps even stronger than) Spanish and German. Only about a month after returning to the US, I left home again and moved to a new city and a new state for my first year of college. The very first day I arrived there, I found a Bosnian restaurant and decided to go there for dinner with my father. I was so pleased to find out that the owners were from Sarajevo and so I was able to practice speaking Croatian with them the whole time we were there. They actually tentatively offered me a job at their restaurant, since I spoke both Croatian and English well and was familiar with Balkan cuisine. Unfortunately, I haven't had the chance to go back to that restaurant since that first night in August since it's not very close to my college campus and I've very much been stuck inside the campus "bubble." I'm hoping that in the upcoming semester I'll be able to go back there, as I'd definitely love to have some ćevapčići, and the prospect of a job where I'd get to practice my Croatian doesn't sound bad either. :) Next matter of business, I have a French roommate this year! I was lucky enough to be placed with an exchange student from France, so you'd think that I'd be speaking French with him all the time, right? Wrong. Apparently my French has gotten just rusty enough in the past year or two that I'm too embarrassed to ever speak it, which of course turns the situation into a vicious cycle. I have spoken with him in French on occasion, though, and he is impressed each time I do, but for the vast majority of the time we simply speak English together. In any case, my French is in desperate need of review and practice. For a linguistics major, I'm required to take at least two years of one foreign language and at least one year of another, and while I may choose to test out of one of the languages (likely using Spanish or German), I wanted to take this opportunity to study something new. I was caught between either Russian or Chinese, but in the end I chose Chinese. I didn't have great experiences with language classes in high school, and Chinese was the first language I ever tried (and failed) to study on my own, so I at first approached the class with some doubt. But to my surprise and delight, the class is actually very well-structured and I feel like we're making speedy progress with the language, in contrast to those useless and sluggish high school language classes. The pace is for the most part right on, perhaps a little slower than I would like sometimes, but other times even faster than I can manage. Instead of teaching to the lowest common denominator like in high school, here they teach to the highest level in the class and expect everyone else to keep up. We're expected to be able to recognize and read both traditional (繁體字) and simplified characters (简体字), but were individually given the choice of which set of characters we wanted to learn to write. I myself chose the traditional characters since all of the Chinese-speakers I know are from Taiwan, they're usually (but not always) more similar to the Japanese kanji that I studied previously, and I also find them more aesthetically pleasing. I've been fairly happy with that choice for the most part, though at times the complexity of some characters is frustrating and a bit ridiculous, given the simplicity of their simplified counterparts (such as 廳 [25 strokes] vs. 厅 [4 strokes]). Something else that I thought would be an issue for me in studying Chinese was the tones, which were in fact the main reason why I gave up on Chinese six years ago. However, the professors emphasized, and continue to emphasize, the tones very heavily, so I feel very confident about them now. We spent the first two weeks of the semester focusing solely on tones and pronunciation, and even now one of our professors will not hesitate to make us repeat ourselves 20 times if necessary in order to get the tones correct. A friend of mine who studied abroad in Taiwan last year told me that after a while, the tones stop seeming like an "extra" element that you have to memorize for each word or character, but rather an integral part of the word/character itself, without which the meaning is incomplete, or simply wrong. The idea made sense to me when he told me, but I couldn't conceive of ever getting to that point myself, at least not in the near future. However, I've already started feeling that way, and have experienced the lack of understanding he described when hearing some of my classmates speaking using incorrect tones. It's really very exciting, which is also how I would describe the entire process of learning Chinese thus far. Now that I'm on break, it's all that I can do to keep myself from learning ahead in the book! I was also studying Arabic for a couple months at the beginning of this semester. I'm living in the Arabic culture dorm at my school, and my neighbor is a visiting Fulbright scholar from Egypt who is teaching some informal Arabic classes twice a week. I attended the classes for the first couple months, but eventually decided that they unfortunately weren't worth the amount of time that I was putting into them. That is, they were only three hours a week, but I didn't feel like I was getting a full three hours' worth of learning since the class was fairly unstructured and the teacher, though a lovely person whom I'm friends with, seemed rather inexperienced in teaching Arabic and, as a native speaker, blissfully unaware of the difficulties it poses to someone unfamiliar with it. However, I was finally able to clear up some confusion I had about the pronunciation of certain letters, and she did tell me that my Arabic pronunciation is better than that of any other non-native speaker she had ever met (which I still take with a grain of salt because I know that I absolutely butcher the pronunciation). Additionally, I was able to gain a bit of background knowledge of the structure of Arabic, which I suppose is helpful for the Arabic loanwords and expressions in Persian. Incidentally, my Persian was extremely helpful while I was still taking part in the class, as she would often write a new word on the board, and I would already know (or at least have an educated guess at) the meaning thanks to Persian. Persian is my main project for now, as I have recently realized just how much I love the language and all the associated culture. It could quite possibly be my favorite language. But I'll write more about that in my new log for the TAC 2014 Persian Team, which I hope to get up and running within the next few days. Finally, as a prospective linguistics major, I naturally took an introductory course in linguistic analysis, which I enjoyed thoroughly. It was extremely interesting to begin studying formally much of what I had already learned on my own through language study, and reading on this forum. We covered the main fields of linguistic analysis in the course, namely phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. I didn't particularly care for the last two (or syntax, for that matter), but everything else was fascinating to me and I already have found what I learned useful in my personal language studies. I was a bit surprised at how mathematical (and challenging!) formal linguistics can be, given that I dislike math, but as opposed to being scared off from the major as a couple of my classmates were, I'm even more intrigued. I'm very much looking forward to the next semester, which will essentially be sociolinguistics, and then the coming years as well. I think that's about all I have to say for now. To wrap up the year, I should probably review all the goals that I undoubtedly did not meet, but I'm not going to do that, as that would be depressing and would kill my motivation for the next year. For now, I'll just say thank you to everyone who followed my spotty progress through 2013, and happy new year to all! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4664 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 24 of 24 31 December 2013 at 4:28pm | IP Logged |
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What a year full of change you had! I remember the feeling of leaving behind your host country very well... In high school I spent a year in New Zealand and it was heartbreaking to leave at the end of it - especially knowing that I wouldn't be back anytime soon (it's basically the farthest from Germany you can go on the globe). Four years later I returned for a holiday and it felt a bit like returning to my second home. I hope your plans for visiting Croatia again in the summer work out.
I also loved phonetics and phonology (which I had to take as an English major) while most of the other students hated it :D Once I did a presentation on "Japlish" - focusing on frequent pronunciation mistakes Japanese ESL students. Not that I knew any Japanese, actually... Probably one of the most fun presentations to prepare for. I found that university is a great opportunity to study languages and meet people who speak my target languages. Seems like it's the same for you. Did you find any Persian speakers yet? ;) I'm very much looking forward to reading about your love for the language in your new log! Edited by druckfehler on 31 December 2013 at 4:29pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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