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Vermillon’s TAC’13 鶴 & Lugus | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4479 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 25 of 73 07 February 2013 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||
Hey, sorry if "I" sounded sarcastic. I am totally serious, I'd love to do that if I had the funds or people would lend me the books! Actually, if the Asiathèque's books were cheaper, I'd have spent some time on a few other languages already. And I'm considering taking their Japanese textbooks (but well, that's 3 books at 60-100€ each), they seem to have received only good reviews... which is far from what can be said of any textbook I've seen in the English language. For Japanese, I may have a closer look at what OneEye mentioned. I had looked for Japanese textbooks in China, but I was probably not in a specialised bookshop, so I didn't find anything interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4508 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 26 of 73 07 February 2013 at 11:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Eh vermillion, comment ça va avec le breton?
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4479 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 27 of 73 08 February 2013 at 8:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Eh bien, je dois dire que ça n'avance pas très vite. J'en suis à la leçon 35, mais depuis deux semaines je n'ai pas eu le temps d'étudier. J'ai aussi commencé un deck Anki dans lequel j'ajoute les phrases et les enregistrements audio: j'espère que ça m'aidera à consolider ce que j'apprends.
Comment ça se passe de ton côté? J'ai vu que demain il y aura à Nantes et Rennes une manifestation pour réclamer la création d'une chaîne de télé "publique" bilingue français/breton. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4508 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 28 of 73 08 February 2013 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ne t'en fais pas, ça doit avancer lentement, il n'y a pas trop de brittophones. J'ai
complété la première vague d'Assimil jusqu'à la 92ème leçon, mais ça ne veut rien dire; , je peux lire un peu de breton, et même écrire, mais j'ai aucune compréhension de la langue orale. Et c'est difficile de s'y habituer quand on ne l'écoute jamais. Pour perfectionner le breton, il faudrait aller en Bretagne. Oh, vraiment! Ça devrait être bien pour la langue, je trouve épouvantable que les média de masse ne soit pas disponibles en breton. Il y a radio Breizh, mais c'est tout. Il y a quelques émissions locales, mais c'est seulement 1 ou 2 heures par semaine, si je ne me trompe pas. Quand j'aurai terminé l'Assimil, j'y reviendrai plus . Je suis presque certain que le breton ne sera pas utile dans l'avenir prochaine, mais je veux retenir ma compréhension de toute façon. J'y rendrai une fois, je sais juste pas exactement quand ça aura lieu. (Et merci si tu corriges mon français, c'est une langue que je parle souvent et je sais me débrouiller, mais évidemment je ne peux pas éviter de faire des fautes). Edited by tarvos on 11 February 2013 at 11:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4479 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 29 of 73 03 March 2013 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi all,
Another month without any real update, and there's really not much to say, but it's time to post one anyway, and hopefully get back on track. February 2013 Report I feel like I could repeat what I've said last month: I hope it's not going to be my best month of the year (though obviously, that should be said every month). As time goes by, I feel that I'm forgetting time management, language learning techniques, and also the self discipline I had acquired before. At the beginning of the year, I decided I'd try to not follow a routine and instead re-evaluate myself regularly: well, now the re-evaluation shows that I'm doing pretty poorly without a routine. It seems that the way I achieve the most is having a very regular habit of study, and I have completely missed that part for the first two months. That's something I want to change, and from March on I'll try to have a stricter schedule. My only concern with strict schedules is that I don't really know how to accommodate tasks that take an indefinite amount of time (write an article?), and as I want to do more of this, particularly "production", I'll have to come up with new ways to study. Ok, now for the detailed work. Mandarin / 普通話: Simple, I've done about nothing. I didn't read for too many days, and simply decided not to even write it on my daily to-do list. The problem is really that 10 pages a day is too much for me: it takes me around 40-60 minutes, and that's a time I don't always want to allocate for Mandarin. Perhaps I should just divide that by two, and hopefully once I'm reading I'll want to continue. Mandarin is not my priority at all for now, so I guess it's fine. Success/Failure & Goals: Failure. No goal, as I want to give more time to other projects. I'll try to continue reading, but that's not my priority. Minnanhua / Hokkien / Taiwanese(?) / 閩南話: My goal for the month didn't seem very difficult to reach, but that's probably better like this. I've had my girlfriend record for me the equivalent in Minnanhua of the vocabulary of the HSK1. Being a Mandarin exam, one would expect a lot of the vocabulary consist of cognates and it was indeed the case. I've arranged those recordings into Anki cards and I've aimed at L1->L2 recall. I already knew some of the words, but for the rest, I've found the task pretty difficult: I've never been any good at reproducing what I hear - or better said, I'm never sure of what I've heard - so I ended up looking up the romanization of a lot of those words, and suddenly they were a lot easier to learn. This reminds me of people saying they want to get as fast as possible away from pinyin and learn characters directly: there must be people who actually manage it, but I've personally never heard of them. Without the romanization, remembering anything more than the general sound of the word has been almost impossible for me: not even mentioning the tones, but even just the aspiration/not of the consonant, which stop is used, etc.. I've nevertheless managed to get a good command over the vocabulary of the HSK1, and I try to use it frequently (though I don't get much answers in Minnanhua from my girlfriend, which is pretty annoying). Success/Failure & Goals: Success. I'm very happy with the small progress I've made this month. For next month, I hope to start tackling the list for HSK2. As it's bigger, I may take more than a month to do it, perhaps 2-3 months. I guess I could aim at covering the HSK3 before my holidays in China this summer: that's enough for simple things of daily life. Classical Chinese / 文言: I've read absolutely nothing. Because reading requires opening the dictionary every other word, it's quite tedious and I haven't managed to find slots in my week to do it. Doing it at week-ends is much easier, but I've been away every week-end of the month, which somehow killed my productivity. Success/Failure & Goals: Failure. Korean / 한국어 / 韓國語: I had decided not to take the TOPIK this spring, to avoid repeating last year's mistake, burning out, but finally couldn't resist and I've applied just before the deadline. I'm completely ready to fail the exam, I just want to get that extra bit of motivation and pressure and, who knows, I might get a pass on level 3 if I'm really lucky. I've increased my daily intake of vocabulary and I aim at covering the KEV6000 B (I know all of A and a bit of B) as soon as possible (30 words/day) and from that I'll just focus on reading/listening/writing until the exam comes. That may not be enough, but I'm sure by the time of the exam, I'll be a step forward. On the little daily successes, I've picked up some manhwa that had been sitting for long on my bookshelf and that I couldn't really read (past the first half page) not so long ago, and found that I could read easily the first ten pages with good understanding without opening a dictionary or grammar. I've found this very encouraging. I think that means I can start reading a bit more extensively some manhwa, and hopefully I'll progress from the regular exposure to sentence structures and idioms. I had also said that I wanted to give a look at iyagi: that's that I've done, I gave it a look... but I'm yet to incorporate it into my daily regimen, and that may have to wait a couple of weeks before I'm almost done with the vocabulary. On hanja, I've stopped learning new ones, and focus on mastering the ones I already know. I'm not quite good at those, and I will resume learning new ones once my "normal" vocabulary intake will have reduced. A final note on the vocabulary: because I want to avoid burning out while keeping a relatively good pace (30/day is not a huge amount, but for me it's pretty heavy already), I've reduced the leech threshold to 5 fails: a lot of my cards fall in it (4% at the moment), but that's fine: I prefer to miss a few percent of a lot than miss nothing of little. Once I'm done with KEV6k, I'll take the time to tackle those leeches properly. Success/Failure & Goals: Success. Now I'm pretty solid on the vocabulary I've learnt last year, and I have learnt around 600 new words. They enter my memory much better, as a lot of them are Chinese loans. The perspective of the TOPIK (April 20th) makes me motivated to go a bit faster, and Korean has therefore taken more room in my daily study than I wish it had, but that's fine. I'm aiming at a level 3, which would be encouraging for my full-year goal of reaching level 4. In any case, London also has an exam in October, so I'll try again by that time. My goal for March is to finish the list B of the KEV6000 and do a few Iyagi lessons to get my ears better trained (better = at all...) at hearing Korean. Japanese / 日本語: I haven't done much for Japanese: I've merely learnt more words, and kept up with reviewing the words I had learnt during January. That's not great, but I've lacked time to do anything more. I've bought the Asiathèque's "Manuel de Japonais" and "Pratique du Japonais", and I hope to get working on those regularly. Given their price, I'd feel guilty if I didn't. Success/Failure & Goals: Average. I didn't really have a goal apart from "keeping up", and that's what I've done. I need to speed up a bit and start studying regularly my new books. Breton / Brezhoneg: The only thing I've done with Breton this month has been reviewing the 35 lessons I had studied in January, and creating an Anki close deck of them, with audio. I didn't have a great experience of close decks before, I had done a Norwegian one (btw, if the people I've sent it to could tell me how they're faring with it, I'd be happy!) and I've realised that a lot of cards were just focusing on vocabulary items that I didn't really need... I'm trying to avoid that with Breton, and focus more on sentence structure. I haven't started using the deck yet, but creating it has been useful and consolidated my knowledge. Success/Failure & Goals: Success. I didn't do much, but I've consolidated the little I already know. Now I can confidently go forward, and perhaps doing another 30 lessons would be a good target for March. Wanderlust: Reading the Canterbury Tales is faring quite well, and even though I haven't been reading it regularly, I got used to the language and can now read it much faster. I've also read a grammar of Scots written in Scots and the similarities with Chaucer's English are striking. I loved reading it, and given that I spend a lot of time in Scotland, I'll surely consider trying to read more Scots. I also found a bookshop which has a lot of cheap 2nd-hand books, a good amount of them being on languages/linguistics and I've bought a grammar of Gothic, more Middle English books (the complete works of Chaucer, and Piers Plowman), the complete works of Dante (I don't speak Italian... anyone knows how easy it would be to read Dante only knowing modern Italian?)... and as they renew their entire basement every month, that gives me a lot of opportunities to be tempted. I don't think I'll resist buying language books, so I may give in to wanderlust a bit later in the year. Summary All in all, not a great month, but I've been juggling with trips to Scotland, my job and trying to follow quite demanding online courses, so it's not too bad. If I gave myself a bit more discipline, I'd probably get much better results on the side of languages. I'll try to update twice during March. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4479 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 30 of 73 14 March 2013 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Since everything is going very well, I thought I'd give a little half-month update, just in case I can't report such good news by the end of the month.
Following my epiphany (sort of) that I needed a more precise schedule, a daily ordered list rather than an unordered one, I've managed to spend much more time with my languages and other projects. I can feel I'm progressing quite fast, and my motivation is peaking. Mandarin: managed to read every single day at my reduced rhythm (was a wise choice). Minnanhua: now tackling HSK2 vocabulary; I've finished the edition part, now I need some additions to Anki, and just practice conversation. Classical Chinese: read for a full hour last week-end. Very pleasant, even though I could go through only 3 pages by the end of the hour... It's the beginning of the book, so I expect my speed will increase slightly with time. Korean: FINALLY finished the list B of KEV6000, I can now claim back the half hour it took me every day to enter cards to do something else instead. It also means that I can get back to the ~150 leeches I've accumulated and destroy them, and that the time spent every day on reviewing cards will slowly decrease. I've also finally started using TTMIK iyagi, but it's too early to say how much good it does to my listening. And finally, I'm doing some extensive reading on a manhwa called 온, I aim at finishing it by the end of the month. And the TOPIK is in 5 weeks from now. 加油！ Japanese: going slowly there. I've just started using my new textbook and I'm mostly reviewing some basics. As Korean is my main focus for now, I'm fine with having Japanese going very slowly. Breton: resumed studying, aiming at 5 lessons/week, and over-learning (I'm stealing the word from emk..) it with Anki. Having the audio added to Anki is really a painful task, but it's definitely useful. It's very likely that once things get a bit more calm I'll try to do this for some of the Assimils I've studied last year. Wanderlust: I'm resisting until now! I've recently bought Assimil Arabic and Italian, but I've managed to discipline myself not to touch them. I'm still reading Chaucer every day, which I guess can count as half a language. Very happy, hopefully I'll keep that level of energy until December (2070). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Haksaeng Senior Member Korea, South Joined 5999 days ago 166 posts - 250 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Korean, Arabic (Levantine) | Message 31 of 73 15 March 2013 at 12:11am | IP Logged | ||
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That's a lot of languages to study!
TTMIK Iyagi lessons made a huge difference in my listening over a period of about six months. I worked my way straight through from #1 all the way to the end. They do get gradually more difficult so for me it was helpful to start from #1. When I started on the first one, I could barely understand any of it, just short phrases and individual words. I didn't have too much trouble reading the transcripts, but there were lots of words that I had to look up, usually about 30 words per lesson. After finishing the whole series, now I just listen to the new ones as they are released and am able to understand them the first time I listen (not perfectly, but at least 90-95%). I admit by the end I got pretty tired of some of the speakers. Wish they had more speakers. 2 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 5357 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 32 of 73 16 March 2013 at 1:56am | IP Logged | ||
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It sounds like you're starting to really pick up speed now. 5 lessons a week in Breton whilst taking time out for all these other languages is impressive. I've got one nagging question at the back of my mind though...what's happening in December 2070? ;)
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