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Vermillon’s TAC’13 鶴 & Lugus | ||
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4472 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 65 of 73 26 October 2013 at 11:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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September/October 2013 Report
Ok, let's go for a two months update this time. I didn't feel I had anything interesting to contribute, and honestly I feel that I still don't but if I wait for that day, it may simply never come, so let's do it. Keeping the original structure of this log doesn't make much sense anymore since about all of my study time is spent on other languages than the ones I registered for. I'll just have a quick summary and a bigger wanderlust section. Mandarin / 普通話: Nothing to mention here. Being back from China, Mandarin is still part of my daily life, so it's ok. I'm not improving in any way, but that would take time and effort, for rewards that are not obvious yet to me. I don't even have time to read anything, so that will probably have to wait for 2014 now. Minnanhua / Hokkien / Taiwanese(?) / 閩南話: Same here. I'm maintaining what I know using Anki and occasionally using it with my girlfriend, but I have no plan for improvement right now. If I go to China again next year, I'll surely try to reach the next stage, like constructing better sentences and expanding my vocabulary. For now, I just don't have any specific reason to do so. Classical Chinese / 文言: Ah, this one is the one I'm really ashamed of! About every month I decide that it must be the month I finish the shuoyuan, and the truth is I haven't touched it for a couple of months! Now the end of the year is coming near, and I really want my goal to be a success, so I'm left with two months to finish reading the book. This is entirely doable, I just need to make the time for it. And from that, I'll try to make sure Classical Chinese occupies a greater part of my life, since I love reading it so much. I also feel that there must be a way to actually improve reading, besides just "doing it", but I'm yet to know the secret. Perhaps finally giving a look at those textbooks I've bought while in China would be a step forward. Anyway, for now, finishing the shuoyuan. Breton / Brezhoneg: This one is a bit more encouraging. I was reporting last time a pretty poor success rate on mature cards of my Anki deck, and things are now getting better with around 90%: this is still not great, but it's coming slowly. I'm also going very slowly through the Morvannou edition, it seems to contain much more idiomatic Breton, and a wider dialectal diversity. It is however not my priority at the moment, and I'm just happy maintaining what I know, reading stuff on Twitter and the occasional blog post that I find interesting. As for several of my languages, my priority is maintenance and I plan improving my skills (passive and hopefully active) next year as part of a general reworking of my study methods. Wanderlust: Here I've continued directly in the line of my previous posts, but it's getting slightly out of control: I'm now getting my Polish deck more mature, which is slow given the poor retention I have over the vocabulary, but it's coming. Same comment as for Breton, I'm just going to keep it getting mature and stable, and will plan improvement next year. I sometimes watch some videocasts on Youtube, but honestly don't understand much of it (though I'm quite thrilled by anything I manage to catch). I've also finished my German deck, and it will be the main focus of my 6WC: trying to chat in German with a (French) friend of mine who's also learning, and through that process I hope to activate all the German that is dormant in me: that's the opportunity to revive a lot of the vocabulary I've learnt, but my goal here is much more expression than vocabulary: I'm sure that through six weeks of daily chat, there will be so many things that I need to express that I'll have covered a great deal, and that will be the foundation for getting to fluency next year (yeah, I dare saying that. Hopefully nobody reads this post) Pursuing the language expansion, I'm now two thirds through the process of creating decks for Spanish and Italian and aim to finish them by the end of the year. I'm not particularly interested in those two for now, so it's possible that they won't be part of next year's plans, at least not to a significant degree, but who knows what could happen in the meantime. In the meantime, I'm also working at snail pace (let's say it's homeopathic exposure) through Swahili, Greek, Armenian and Arabic, mostly out of linguistic curiosity. Finally, in the list of my new languages, I'll make Hungarian the other language of my 6WC, with the simple goal of completing the study of the Assimil book I have by the end of it, which should be round 70 lessons in 42 days, probably quite intense but I hope I can do it. I'm sitting all day next to a Hungarian guy who seems to be supportive and to be genuinely interested in the questions I ask about the language, so it seems to me I'd be stupid not to jump on that opportunity. The fact that a friend of mine (mentioned above for German) is going willing to go through the process with me adds to the motivation, and plans to travel next year finally add a lot to my interest for Hungarian. Summary TL;DR. I didn't think I'd reach that stage, but now I really need to force myself not to start anything new. I still have the desire to go for a few of them (and planning to read EuroGerm during the 6WC won't help with that), but for now I'm anyway too busy to add anything to my plate. I've found that Assimil's MP3 cds are an amazing ressources and I've created a program that converts the cd into a deck for Anki that pairs every single sentence with its recording, which saves me around 30h/language of editing/typing and which is the reason I've been able to add a few languages to my list recently. Related to that, I'd be interested if anyone had the MP3 cd (not the 4 normal cds...) for Swahili, or in fact for any language, could contact me. I'd be very happy to help you create one of those decks that have helped me immensely in the past few months. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4472 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 66 of 73 02 November 2013 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Very quick 6 Week Challenge update:
During this 6WC, I wanted to tackle German but finally I'll go for a trio: -German: I've always sucked at it, and never quite managed to stay focused long enough to reach one day a decent level in any of the four skills, so I'll try to change a bit my bad habits and do something about it. Here's my daily plan: -reading 40 minutes. I guess I'll be reading EuroGerm rather than attempt to read a novel, and if it proves successful, I may try to do more of my technical (or instructional) reading in German in the future: I figured out that my English was decent mostly because I have to do about everything in English, so I'll try to do less of these in English and more in German. -listening 20 minutes. Not decided what, but except if I find something more interesting, I'll look for popular Youtubers (not language related). -writing 30 minutes. Merely trying to chat with a (French) friend in German, and making efforts to use structures to get accustomed to them. With these three, I should be able to put in around 60h during the challenge. That probably won't make me great, but perhaps at least a bit better. -Hungarian: Merely trying to go through the entire Assimil book (being 20% of the way already), which may have to be extended to the end of December if the rhythm is too intensive. In the process, I'll have a native speaker to ask questions, and from there perhaps I will try to slowly climb the levels of the CEFR scale. -Classical Chinese: as said elsewhere, my goal is to finish 说苑. It's an easy target of around 3 pages per day, and the 6WC is merely an excuse to force myself to read every single day. Ok, that's it. We'll see in six weeks where I'm at. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4472 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 67 of 73 22 November 2013 at 12:30am | IP Logged | ||
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Today I will do a quick mid-6WC report, just to see where I am and share my latest (obvious) thoughts on language learning and plans for the future.
-German: I'm actually around the daily 1h30 mark and frankly happy about it, but I'm nowhere near the time repartition I had planned at first: -Writing: I did absolutely no production activity, which has always been a problem for me because I need larger time spans and a complete absence of stress, and tend to suffer from procrastination (I could even decide to tidy up my room just to avoid getting to writing...). I really need to learn how to get out of this trap, as here the anti-procrastination techniques I usually use are not very effective. I would welcome comments on that, especially if you've solved the problem for yourself before... I think extreme time-boxing could possibly be of help. -Listening: I'm very happy about that one. Didn't do as much as planned (~12mn), but I've basically looked up the list of the most popular channels on Youtube in Germany, and this solved the problem of "finding" the content: most of them are podcasts made for young people (I would guesss covering an age span of 15-25?), some discuss a topic, some are acted, and they provide enough context visually to make up for what I don't understand. They're usually funny, and I tend to pick up a few words, including slang which I wouldn't learn otherwise. That's also a relatively relaxing activity, and I can transfer my bad habit of watching video after video after video to German and make it something rather positive. -Reading: this is my main activity, with an average of ~1h15. I absolutely love it, and I feel relatively proud of my success. I've started reading the EuroComGerm and after the first few pages, the amount of unknown vocabulary quickly dropped and I can now easily read 10-12p/h. I am very happy with my choice of reading technical stuff rather than novels: the vocabulary tends to be more repetitive (I still learn tons of vocabulary from it, but at least it's not overwhelming), more explanatory (which is good to learn argumentative structures) and I'm learning stuff. The best of all in this is the realisation that, yes, my German is good enough to actually get on reading! I expect to improve my level of German by doing more of my reading in German from now on. I should be able to finish EuroComGerm by the end of the challenge, and to prepare for what would come after, I've ordered some books (light linguistics, Indo-European studies, stuff about Hungary and a Hungarian grammar). -Hungarian: It's going quite well, now around 40% through, but I was a bit optimistic with my initial deadline and it looks like I'll be able to go through the entire book only by January, which is still fine. So far, I really love it, the grammar is really interesting and pleasant, the vocabulary is not easy (but also not that difficult) and I love to decompose longer words, it's really a game for me. Well, it's only passive for now, and it will probably be like this for a while. Ah, and I found a second-hand book, in Hungarian, about constructed languages (Bábeltől a világnyelvig : "From Babel to the World Language") written by an Esperantist some 35 years ago. What a coincidence! -Classical Chinese: I'm on track, reading a bit every day, which should indeed mean I'll finish by the end of the challenge. So globally, I'm on track in the three languages, I hope to continue like this until the end of the challenge. As usual I haven't managed to do any "production" activity.. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4662 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 68 of 73 05 December 2013 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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vermillon, did you finish your Classical Chinese reading? :) Let us know on the team thread and I'll add you to the list!
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4472 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 69 of 73 13 December 2013 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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6 Week Challenge Summary (and quick end of year summary):
6WC During this 6WC, I've apparently spent 110h studying/reviewing, something like 2h37 per day on average. I wish it had been much more, and I wish it had all been focused on a single language, but this is not too bad. -German: I had planned writing/reading/listening, and in the end I did only reading/listening. reading: I've read around two thirds of the book EuroComGerm and will probably need the end of the year to complete it. I'm extremely pleased with my progress so far, because it was a real revelation to me that I was actually able to read books in German. I've also read many long Wikipedia articles and tons of book reviews on Amazon. Amazon reviews are great, they're slightly more "spoken" in terms of language, they're interesting and usually contain useful vocabulary for a learner to re-use. I've also bought several books in German to sustain my reading next year, a couple of novels, books about linguistics, as well as a couple of grammars (Ungarisch/Polnisch). listening: I subscribed to some of the biggest channels in Germany on Youtube and watched their podcasts. I was here as well surprised by how much I could understand, I had not expected that either. Of course, the content of these podcasts tend to be not too complicated, and the visual element helps a lot as well, but still, that's a nice confidence boost. follow-up: I take all this as a signal that "fluency" could actually be in reach, something I had never really thought I could ever achieve with German. I will therefore take German as one of my languages for the TAC 2014, with the goal of reaching B2 and take certification. This will still require a lot of work, and above all, I'll have to learn how to learn, something I feel I actually don't really know how to do (I was just lucky with Mandarin). -Hungarian: I originally thought I could complete the entire Assimil book, but that would have supposed 2 lessons per day, which I could not reasonably attempt without a very high chance of burning out. I did only 1 lesson per day, and I can feel that I'm about at my limit. I've been adding every lesson to Anki (well, with a script), and reviewing them took me around 45mn/day, which is a lot of Anki. I'm now 60% through the book, and I plan to spread the last 40% until the end of January. Hungarian has been very pleasant to study until now, very stimulating intellectually, and having both a friend learning it to discuss what we had learned and a native friend to ask questions to made it even more interesting. I will take Hungarian as my second TAC language next year, and I hope that a target of B1 is somewhat reachable in that time frame. -Classical Chinese: I finished reading 说苑! This took me some time, but I'm happy I've done it. I've realised after/while reading all this, that a very good dictionary was absolutely crucial. Most of the book, I have read with my character dictionary, which is ok and I've really improved a lot throughout the year. Still, thinking back of the "readers" I've used before (for some sections of 汉书 and 孟子) had glosses for tons of bisyllabic words, and for that you need a word dictionary. Classical Chinese "word" dictionaries are huge, from a couple of very voluminous tomes to spreading over a couple of bookshelves, so this is not a practical solution for me, not only because I can't host them, but also because I can't carry it around when I go somewhere on a week-end. The solution seems to be to go the electronic route. I have tried a copy of Cihai 辞海 in Stardict, and I've seen how much more information I could get and how much I missed by not having it before. Unfortunately, here as well being in front of the computer all the time to search words wasn't very practical for me, so from next year I'll get a tablet, install Pleco on it and buy 古汉语大词典. I'm sure it will prove to be a pleasure to use and will enhance my reading. I plan to start tackling the entire bookshelf of Classical Chinese words I have acquired this summer, as well as get myself acquainted with poetry. TAC 2013 / rest I'll conclude here my TAC for this year. A couple of weeks are left, but not much more will happen, I will be finishing the few tasks mentioned above, prepare ressources for next year, and more generally just take some rest. It hasn't been an extremely successful year TAC-wise since I've dropped Korean and Japanese (it's probably a good thing, though) and that my Mandarin is not quite as good as it used to be, but at least I know I can get back to speak quickly when the need arises. On the bright side, I've reached my goals in Breton (finishing Assimil and maintaining it), Taiwanese (I have a good command of around 850 words, which seems to be enough for my use of it, and I'll get further next time I go there) and Classical Chinese (see 6WC). All in all, it makes it a 50% success rate, though of course the 3 languages I've succeeded in had a much easier goal to reach than the 3 others, so in the end it's mostly a failure. I've been exploring many languages too and am very happy with how it enriched my general linguistic knowledge and how it's helped me in worked having more insights. I've been touching Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Polish, Greek, Armenian (very briefly), Swahili and Norwegian (and of course German and Hungarian) and have read the Canterbury Tales in Middle English. This has helped me realising that I had too much on my plate and that it was simply not possible to handle that much and making any progress. I have dropped entirely Korean, Japanese, Greek, Armenian and Swahili and do not intend to touch them again for a few years I hope. As for the remainder, I'll just maintain vaguely what I know by doing my reps on Anki (which averages to 1h/month per language), but I don't intend to bring them further for now. The only languages I intend to study next year to any serious degree are German (>B2), Hungarian (>B1) and Polish (>B1). I would love to take my Norwegian to a B1-B2 but I feel that would be too many languages and in the meantime I think it's better not to spread myself too much. I'll also read Classical Chinese regularly, to a slower rhythm. And as I know I may want "novelty" as some point during the year, I'm keeping Dutch on the side, just to get familiar with it. I'll also try to reduce my amount of reading in English and French to the minimum and transfer it to German: this seems to me like the only way I can possibly reach B2 in it. Voilà, this is pretty much it. Thanks to both my teams for making the travel interesting, Team Lugus for the broad view of the Celtic family and the genuine enthusiasm for these lesser studied languages, and Team Asian for the convivial atmosphere, with a particular mention to druckfehler for all her efforts to keep the team on track (it was not easy, for sure), organising challenges and sending me reminders. :) See you next year! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4501 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 70 of 73 13 December 2013 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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What about Breton, then? Petra a reoc'h?
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4472 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 71 of 73 13 December 2013 at 3:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, Breton is part of this group of languages (along with Spanish, Italian and Norwegian) that I will keep on reviewing, but probably won't do more during the next year. I plan to go through the old Assimil edition though, doing only one lesson per week.
But indeed, probably no active use of it. It's been a real pleasure for me to learn what I've learnt, and it was motivating to see you doing it as well (and I believe you mentioned you'd do an immersion period in Brittany next year?). As far as I see, I am not able to juggle with too many languages and make progress at the same time, so I have to make choices.. and when I go to Brittany, I don't go to a Breton-speaking area. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4501 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 72 of 73 13 December 2013 at 4:56pm | IP Logged | ||
I am hoping to, but I don't think it'll happen (instead, I will immerse myself in Romanian if all goes well). On the other hand, I have an interesting offer waiting, namely an interview for a Breton radio station in Paris by a Breton-speaking friend of mine. I don't know yet when (I still need to respond and fix a date) but I think once that comes out, you'll hear me on Breton radio. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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