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LakeSea’s (In)decisive Log | ||
Tags: Sign Language | Portuguese | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Italian | Japanese | Russian | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4132 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes  Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 17 of 23 03 August 2013 at 7:12am | IP Logged |
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Primeira atualização do agosto. Foram umos dias muito agitados, por isso não atualizei meu log em um tempo.
ITALIAN Current mission: same as last week While I'm still struggling to find my footing whenever I start the conversation, I'm being able to hold small conversations at home and giving slightly more elaborate opinions. I've noticed it's not quite so hard so get rolling when the other person starts the conversation. I wonder why that is. I've been trying to finish work early enough to participate in an Italian chat group in Verbling or Google+, but for some reason I never manage to do it. I've also been hoping to try a one-on-one chat on Verbling, but with this schedule it's hardly a surprise that I haven't been able. Lesson wise, I'm currently at Imperfetto on Duolingo. This tense's conjugations may be similar to Spanish, but for some reason it's kicking my butt waaaaay more than Passato Prossimo ever did. I've incorporated about 15-20 minutes of SRS every morning to my routine, and I've noticed a slight difference in vocab retaining. Also, it helps keep my downtimes interesting! PORTUGUESE Current mission: same as last week I've noticed my progress in Portuguese is slowing down in comparison to Italian. However, given that I don't really have an active deadline (beyond a vague "B1 by end of year") for this language, I'm not really worried about it, as long as I don't abandon it. I haven't slacked off: I still study it every day, but I don't dedicate the same number of minutes to it that I put into Italian. As my first book, I've chosen "No Pais dos Ianques", by Adolfo Caminha. Grammar wise it's turning out to be a relatively easy read, but I'm highlighting a lot of new words to make them into a new vocab index (maybe into a new deck SRS). I didn't think my comprehension would be too high, though, so no surprise there. JAPANESE SIGN LANGUAGE Current mission: top secret ;) I haven't had the time to improve my vocabulary that much (and out of lack of usage opportunities, today I discovered I'd forgotten three kana signs!! I really need to get back on the horse). However, I'm learning about two to three new signs a week, which is still improvement. I've tried putting my own sentences together, but I don't have a practice partner yet, so no way to know where I'm messing up. More on that when I find an effective way to practice, I guess. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4132 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 18 of 23 04 August 2013 at 8:28am | IP Logged |
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I forgot to mention this yesterday, but as of late I'm addicted to an iOS game called Angry Words. It's your garden variety online multiplayer Scrabble, only it allows for games in Italian, Brazilian and Iberic Portuguese, French, Spanish, German, English... and I think I'm forgetting about two more languages.
It's incredibly fruitful as a vocab exercise because it's forced me to use all my dictionaries more often. After checking the meaning, I try to put each word in context so I won't forget it quickly, and after the game is over, I review the board as a self-test, to see what I remember and what I don't. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4132 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 19 of 23 13 August 2013 at 3:14am | IP Logged |
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More than a log update, this is a bit of an announcement. There are several things on my mind unrelated to the languages that I'm currently studying, but still related to learning languages, so I decided to launch a blog so as to put them in order and make them more readily available.
I'm currently writing this blog in English, Spanish and Japanese, and I'm slowly but surely putting resources, reviews and articles on learning all three languages as well as all other languages I'm learning or have studied at some point. I also have plans to add media other than written articles, but I can't tell when I'll be able to do so (damn you, off-line life). However, I'm sort of hoping I'll be able to deliver the first one by the end of the month. Anyway, here it is: thepolyglotist.com If you find it (mediumly to more or less, or not really, but you happen to be a very polite person) interesting, feel free to leave a comment. :) Edited by Lakeseayesno on 13 August 2013 at 3:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4132 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 20 of 23 18 August 2013 at 11:47pm | IP Logged |
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Okay, here's a quick update that is vaguely connected to my current language learning situation, but not to the progress made since I last updated the log.
I feel like I've learned to manage my time better than I did at the beginning of the year, so that's a plus eight months into 2013. However, as of late I've felt like my interest for Portuguese is waning, and consequently, I'm putting less effort into it. That I'm putting less and less hours a week into it. The progress curve between Italian and Portuguese is spreading more and more apart. It isn't that I don't do the work and forget it quickly (it blessedly is similar enough to Spanish that it takes a long time for me to forget about what I've learned thus far), so it's not a problem of making no progress. This has led me to do some soul-searching, with worrying results. Italian I study because I love how it sounds, and because adapting to its grammar poses a bigger challenge than I thought initially. However, I'm studying Portuguese because of a rather loose connection to my family and the unconfirmed possibility of visiting Brazil next year--the language in itself hasn't "caught" me yet. I need to find a way to keep me a bit more interested in Portuguese. Reading No Pais dos Ianques has been an interesting challenge, but sometimes I just don't have the energy to read more than a page before crashing at night. On that note, I've noticed that for me, the "hook" is almost unvariably music--it happened with English and Japanese, and it's happening with Italian. Maybe I just need to find that hook in the form of some Brazilian rock band... any suggestions? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4132 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 21 of 23 23 March 2014 at 2:14am | IP Logged |
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Good grief, 7 months since I last updated this log.
First off, what's happened in these 7 months: It's been a very long time since I devoted time to anything but Italian and Japanese, so I'll take this opportunity to come clean about something: I've discovered that between me and the Portuguese language, an invisible (and yet incredibly thick!) wall exists. I was studying it as part of a self-assigned mission in order to make a short stay in São Paulo more fun; however, the more I studied, the less the language stuck, which had never happened to me with my other languages. Rather serendipitously, however, my São Paulo sojourn was cancelled: the moment that happened, I dropped my Portuguese hours like a hot potato. Either there is some sort of biological incompatibility, or I crashed and burned like only the best do. I still don't know which, but I don't feel like picking it back up just yet. Second, what's going on currently: After a short period concentrating in Esperanto (out of pure curiosity), right now I'm taking advantage of an extremely rare chance to study Nahuatl. A friend who's studied it for years (several dialects of it, actually) has agreed to tutor me in it and I've been gathering resources, which I've also found to be scarce but pretty well documented. There is no lack of Nahuatl speakers, particularly in my side of the Mexican woods, but actual classes are scarce and from what I hear, not very constant because the number of students fluctuates very heavily, which means I'll be doing most of the footwork on my own. As for Esperanto, I've got a pretty good idea of the grammar basics by now, but I'm lacking in vocabulary and actual practice. Rather than stress myself out with deadlines this time, I've decided to change my log's groundrules to make things more interesting: 1. I'll use the log to report only when I've passed a language milestone. 2. As an exercise, I'll make a point of trying to translate said log in the pertinent language. If I find I cannot, I'll translate only up to where I can. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5663 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 22 of 23 23 March 2014 at 8:19am | IP Logged |
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I'd love to read/hear about your experience learning Nahuatl. Are the dialects even remotely mutually intelligible? I remember reading that Zapoteco, for example, was often quite different from one village to the next. It's odd how languages like Quechua have maintained a fairly good degree of mutual intelligibility despite being spread across such a large area while other languages which are focused in a much smaller area seem to have diverged much more linguistically.
I'd also love to hear what resources you've found. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4132 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 23 of 23 24 March 2014 at 12:01am | IP Logged |
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I didn't know that tidbit about Zapoteco, but I'm not surprised to hear so considering where it's spoken. You can trust Southern Mexican languages to be all over the place: the Isthmus region (Oaxaca, Chiapas and Tabasco) is the door to Mexico from South and Central America, so it's also one of the most linguistically rich regions in the country.
While I'm not too savvy about Nahuatl dialectology, I know for a fact that not all Nahuatl's dialects are mutually intelligible. Your question got my curiosity going so I investigated a bit: for starters, there are quite a few dialects across a huge geographical stretch of the country. I counted 29 as recognized by Ethnologue. If you consider these dialects are spoken in over half of the territory of a country as large as Mexico is (which, incidentally, has another 66 national languages too), that not all of them are mutually intelligible comes as no surprise... By way of resources, I'd love to compile my findings in one place! I think I'll do so in my log's first post (since it regards TAC 2013, which I didn't finish, it's sort of pointless now). I found I must be extra cautious precisely because of the dialect thing. If Nahuatl learning resources in the Internet were logs, I could've built a dam with what I've found by now, but not everything is written by people from the same region, and at least while I'm a beginner, I'd like to keep my learning materials as uniform as possible. I'll be focusing in Central Nahuatl, which is what my friend focuses on, as well as the dialect spoken where I live and the most widespread variety. At this point I'm using an introduction to the language he wrote (which you can find here, in Spanish), and Mexica Ohui, also in Spanish. Right now I'm reviewing about three or four other resources to see if I can make use of them, but both of these are pretty good. Edited by Lakeseayesno on 24 March 2014 at 12:02am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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