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TAC Romulan - Portuguese - Norwegian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| WoofCreature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 4326 days ago 80 posts - 118 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 17 of 26 14 September 2013 at 7:42am | IP Logged | ||
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School has been crazy so far, but I'm starting to get used to incorporating language into the spare minutes again. I also recently got an ereader so that's going to allow me to read a lot more.
French Now that school has started I once again have regular French exposure and practice. I have a new French teacher this year. The teacher I was supposed to have was known for being a tough marker, but an excellent teacher. But just before school started she decided to take a job back home in Quebec, so my current teacher was hired a week before school started. She's quite good so far; I thought she was a native for a good half an hour until she told us otherwise. She has actually been learning French exactly as long as I have; she started the immersion program at age eleven the same year that I started it at five. This is only her second year teaching. I don't know whether to be inspired or discouraged by her level. I'm a bit worried about how much non-native French I'm consuming because I don't have any native speakers as teachers at the moment. I have one other class taught by an obviously non-native teacher and a badly-translated online course. I should probably be incorporating native materials into my routine at home, but with two other languages needing attention much more than French does, I don't know how much I will. Portuguese A few weeks ago I started writing on lang8 almost everyday, but now that school has started I can only manage the weekends. I had my first "conversation" in Portuguese, though it wasn't very long. My dad has a Brazilian exchange student staying with him again this semester so during supper the first time I met him it was mentioned that I "spoke" Portuguese, so he started speaking to me. I was very nervous though and it didn't go very well. Since then I haven't really seen him because I don't live with my dad and when I am there he's usually out with friends. He goes to my school and has a bunch of Brazilian friends though so hopefully I can work my way into a conversation with them at some point. Since then I've tried to do some shadowing with varying results and have been reading aloud. I finished that book from the library, Cão de cabelo, and got half way through it a second time before I had to return it. I loved how colloquially it was written, it would be nice to find more like it. I have a number of free ebooks on my Kobo now that I've been reading, but I'm going to buy some here soon because, quite frankly, most of the free ones kind of suck. I still haven't finished A cidade do sol, though I want to get back to it soon. Norwegian Finally this week I've been giving more attention to Norwegian by listening to the Klar Tale podcasts on my commute and by reading Klar Tale articles on my Kobo. Reading is kind of pointless though until I find a Norwegian-English dictionary that I can convert to be used on my Kobo. I've also been going through this course on Memrise that has a whole bunch of sentences with audio that I have been shadowing. The new season of I kveld med Ylvis has given me renewed interest in the language. I'm kind of at that point where it's no longer a fresh, new, interesting language anymore but it's not a comfortable, usable language yet either. I was hoping to be able to read novels by now, but my long hiatus obviously hindered that. I've just got to keep on trucking through and eventually I'll look back at a clip I watched a hundred times and think, "Wow, a year ago I couldn't understand a word of this and now I don't even have to try." Other Wanderlust has been hitting me hard lately. Finnish, Hindi, Mandarin, Czech, Cree, Hungarian, Greek, Russian, Inuktitut, ASL, Indonesian, I could go on. I won't be starting anything else though until the end of the year, one because I can't choose between them all and two because I'm going to be applying for an exchange program for the next school year and the country I end up going to is going to obviously dictate which language I need to focus on. If I don't end up going to Norway or Brazil, I need to improve Norwegian and Portuguese as much as possible so that I can maintain them more easily while I focus on the new language. Of course, this is all dependent on me actually getting selected to go on the exchange, but I'm hopeful. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5009 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 18 of 26 14 September 2013 at 8:39am | IP Logged | ||
(A bit of a late response, but I've just discovered your log, WoofCreature)... This is no doubt the teacher who's now left for another job, but just in case you have a similar experience with another teacher... Her linguistic skills may not necessarily be at fault. - As people get older, brain performance related to memory also declines. - It's part of the normal aging process, and one doesn't have to be actually "old-old" for it to manifest itself. When a teenager, I myself wondered why adults sometimes found it difficult remembering familiar names or commonplace words (in their native languages)... And now, of course, to my bemusement and occasional consternation, "the shoe's on the other foot", as it were. Edited: to correct typos. Edited by songlines on 15 September 2013 at 5:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| WoofCreature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 4326 days ago 80 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 19 of 26 15 September 2013 at 2:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Right, I have my own memory fails at times too. That was only one incident of many though, such as her making a note on a phrase I wrote such as, "le chapeau canadien" saying that she needed to check, but she thought "canadien" should be capitalized.
She actually wasn't the teacher that left, she was another last-minute replacement. The teacher I had last year and for the previous two years, who was also an excellent teacher, had to leave half way through the semester because of health issues. We had substitute teachers for a month before we finally got the teacher that the comment was referring to and by then we were just frustrated by the whole situation. Her and the teacher that had to leave are now splitting the school day, each teaching two classes. So the school has had a lot of issues with French teachers lately. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| WoofCreature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 4326 days ago 80 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 20 of 26 28 October 2013 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Just after posting my last update I found out about the sudden success Ylvis have oddly had because of their fox video. I was already going to focus on Norwegian for a few months, but their success has helped. I have found that unfortunately, focusing on just one language at a time for a few months seems to work best. I find this unfortunate because I think that will limit how many languages I can add and maintain. Also, I seem to have issues when changing focus languages, as my brain yearns for the previous focus language for awhile. Things could change though as I continue to improve my languages. Starting in January I either want to focus on making my passive skills in Portuguese active or start another language, depending on if I get into the exchange program I'm applying for and on what country I go to if I get accepted. Unfortunately though, my chances of going on this exchange do not look very promising.
French I've been doing a fair bit with French lately. I really like my French teacher this year, despite her being a non-native speaker who has been learning it exactly as long as I have. We literally started on the same day, but she's miles ahead of me. We're currently reading The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho, which is kind of cool considering I came very close to reading that as my first book in Portuguese instead of Veronika Decides to Die. I'll be taking the DELF B2 exam at the end of November. To prepare a bit more, me and a friend have started texting in French. We were supposed to start speaking in French to each other too, but it just seems so weird and we're usually around other non-French-speaking friends. I've also been teaching my sister some sentences in French. She took her first two years of school in French but had to be moved into English so has forgotten everything. She's been learning French as a class for the past few years, but they don't learn much. So far our sentences include "Ma chemise est rouge" and "Mon chat est noir et blanc." Portuguese Portuguese has been very neglected since September, though I have continued to read through a novel on my Kobo. This past week before the 6wc starts I have been trying to focus on Portuguese, since I'll be ignoring it even more then, but it's been difficult. Norwegian just seems so much more appealing. I have managed to do a bit of shadowing though. Even though everything Portuguese-speaking seems quite unappealing at the moment, I'm trusting the situation will reverse once I start focusing on it. I think a few posts from July and August are proof of that. Norwegian I've been pretty focused on Norwegian since my last update. Ylvis' sudden success has brought some annoyances (such as half of the comments on all of their videos being English speakers whining for subtitles) but also a lot of good. Largely thanks to a few channels making English subtitles, my Norwegian has improved a ton. I plan on focusing on Norwegian until the end of the year, at which point I should be able to struggle through a novel while I focus on another language. Based on a video by Idahosa Ness I decided to try to shadow a rap, so I learnt the first 25 seconds of this song by Ylvis. I don't know how much it helped, but now I've switched to learning short segments of speech, as I think that will prove more beneficial. Besides that, I've been reading lots of news articles with the help of a pop-up dictionary and listening to the Klar Tale podcast on my commute. Other Oh, wanderlust. I'm starting to think learning Czech might be unavoidable. We'll see. If I don't go on an exchange and instead go straight to university next year, having another language, especially one I'm not able to understand with any ease, would not be a smart move. It's already going to be all I can do to keep my current three languages alive, let alone four. we shall see, though I'm seeing the same thing that happened with Norway and Norwegian happen with the Czech Republic and Czech. I can't even really explain it, it just demands my attention. We shall see. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| WoofCreature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 4326 days ago 80 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 21 of 26 14 December 2013 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, so a lot has happened. I have good news though! I was accepted to go on a year-long exchange next year! I will be leaving sometime in August. I won't know what country I will be going to until March, so that kind of sucks that I won't have much time to learn a new language if I don't go to Norway or Brazil, but I'm sure I'll do fine. Now that the 6wc is over, I'm going to try a more balanced schedule between Portuguese and Norwegian. We shall see how that goes...
French I took the DELF B2 exam almost three weeks ago. I think it went quite well. I was the most worried about the spoken component, but I think I did alright. I spoke about the trend of wild animals being kept as pets, which I had entirely too much to say about. Ironically, among all of my classmates, the topic quickly became infamously known as "the ferret" simply because people freaked out and didn't bother to read once they saw the picture of a ferret on the topic sheet. Probably the worst moment was not being able to remember the word for fox, while The Fox song blared in my head and I could easily remember the word in Norwegian. Thankfully, after drawing a fox and writing "Ka sier reven" on my planning sheet(I didn't realize we handed it in at the end of the exam...) I did finally remember. Other than that, I've been reading the weirdest book on the planet, La Machination du scorpion noir, which a friend brought back from Quebec this past summer. Also, we read Le malade imaginaire by Molière, watched a performance of it on Youtube(one of the rare times when watching something is worse than reading it) and now this weekend I have to enact some scenes with some classmates and record it for the teacher. That will be fun... Portuguese Portuguese has been suffering greatly since September, but I've continued to get at least a few minutes of listening and reading done each week. Last week I decided to try sharedtalk, which was awesome. For almost two hours I managed to write mostly in Portuguese while at times keeping over six conversations going, some in English, some in Portuguese and some in both(they wrote in English and I in Portuguese). I made loads of mistakes and sometimes had to rephrase sentences, but considering how rusty the language is for me right now, I am very happy with how it went. I don't think I could do that in Norwegian yet, but if a Norwegian asks to chat I'll happily oblige. Now that the 6wc is over and I can revive Portuguese I think I will make sharedtalk a habit. Norwegian The 6wc was mostly a success. I managed almost 40 hours the first two weeks but slowed down a lot once Ylvis' show ended and the influx of translated videos significantly decreased. I then made the mistake of spending too much time on English-speaking fansites trying to find more translations. Oh well. I'm going to buy The Hunger Games ebook and audio book sometime this month, probably on Boxing Day when it should be the cheapest, and Listen-Read it with a borrowed copy from a friend. I still can't seem to convert a dictionary to the Kobo format, though I've tried quite sporadically. I might just end up contacting the creator of the tool for help if I still can't figure it out soon. This will probably be my last log update for the year. I think I will start a new log next year, simply because it annoys me that I can't change the tags on the thread, so it currently says Portuguese and Tagalog. I'll post a link on the first post. Thank you to every one who read my log over the past year. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Emily96 Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4228 days ago 270 posts - 342 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Finnish, Latin | Message 22 of 26 16 December 2013 at 9:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Glad to hear you're satisfied with your progress! That exchange sounds like an amazing opportunity, what
organization is it with? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5009 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 23 of 26 16 December 2013 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||
Ah, and did you get to mention the monkey found in the Ikea parking lot..? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| WoofCreature Diglot Groupie Canada Joined 4326 days ago 80 posts - 118 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: German, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 24 of 26 18 December 2013 at 6:27am | IP Logged | ||
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Emily96: Thanks, I will be going through Rotary, through their Youth Exchange program. I'm so excited!
songlines: No, I didn't even think of that! That would have been good to talk about too. I mostly just referred to the knowledge about animals that I acquired a few years ago, back when I spent as much time learning about the subject as I now spend learning languages. The reason I needed the word for fox was because one of my major points was about this really interesting experiment that has resulted in essentially domesticated foxes. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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