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Lorinth’s log - 劳伦的博客 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4056 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 113 of 408 19 July 2013 at 10:18am | IP Logged | ||
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ZH
Read a bit of 余华's 《活着》 in French while listening to the ZH audio version. Finished chap. 1 of 《盗墓笔记》. Am considering reading it again. Read part of an article saying that 欧盟禁止所有欧盟成员国与位于巴勒斯坦被占 领领土的以色列定居点企业 或机构进行贸易 (the EU forbids all its Member States to do business with companies or organisations based in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories). The article. Watched more videos for kids about fruit and animals. Usual vocab drills: words in Pleco, Cloze production sentences in Anki, characters in Skritter. FI Listened to the news on Selkouutiset while reading the transcription. LA Read chap. 1 of Winnie Ille Pu. It will be different than reading Regulus, if only because I've never read A.A. Milne's original version. On the other hand, I've watched some episodes of the animated cartoon version on TV with my kids, so I know what it's all about. An interesting feature is that the stories and the dialogues are often poetic in a slightly surreal way, so I may not be able to tell whether the outlandish stuff is due to the author having fun or to a misunderstanding on my part. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4056 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 114 of 408 21 July 2013 at 7:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Started a novel by 亦舒 called 早上七八点钟的太阳. It's on real dead tree paper, for a change. We'll see if I can stand the shock of abandoning my cozy Pleco reader. I'll keep Pleco handy, of course, as a dictionary. I can't remember why I bought this particular novel by this particular author. The Wikipedia page about her lists 286 works, no less, many of them novels. Impressive? That's peanuts: her brother 倪匡 has written "more than 300 wuxia and science fiction novels and more than 400 film scripts". Info in EN about Yi Shu. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4056 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 115 of 408 31 July 2013 at 8:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Back from a one-week holiday in Greece, where I spent more time building castles of
sand and admiring ruined castles of marble than studying languages. However... ZH I continued reading the novel I'd just started, namely 早上七八点钟的太阳, by 亦舒. I decided to read it intensively, i.e. I looked up every character whose meaning and/or pronunciation was doubtful. Concretely, first, I read one page "cold": not looking up anything in the dictionary and I doing my best to guess the meaning of unknown words and remember the pronunciation of those I'd already studied and then forgotten; second, I read the page again and looked up every doubtful character. I scribbled notes in the margin or above the text: the meaning if necessary; just the pinyin when I knew the meaning or had guessed it right; just tones above the characters, in many cases. Third, I read the page again, to make sure everything was in place. No need to say that my pace was quite slow. It could take anywhere between 30 and 45 minutes to "read" one page. On the plane back, having reached page 25, I decided to switch to a more "extensive reading" mode for a while. The novel, up to now, is slightly disappointing, naive and not credible. -- I read a biography and anthology of Su Dong Po (Moundaren ed.). It counts as language learning because the biographical part is interspersed with poems and letters in Chinese and in translation, so I could try to follow the Chinese version as best as I could. Though I wouldn't dream, at the present stage, of understanding the Chinese of 1000 years ago, many poems were surprisingly easy to follow with the aid of the translation. The bibliographical part read like a vivid novel. The life of a free thinking mandarin was certainly not easy at the time. The story of Su Dong Po's life was so detailed and moving that I felt just like in front of the ruins of Knossos, where you don't know what is "authentic" and what is the fruit of the imagination of the archaeologist. Wikipedia on Su Dong Po. -- Minimal vocabulary diet: I simply reviewed my SRS queue in Anki, without adding new words. Also in Pleco, I didn't add any new words. I did three or four study sessions in Skritter, but my backlog is now rather big. GRC "GRC" is the ISO code for ancient Greek, apparently. I've been dreaming for a long time of learning ancient Greek. Homer. Sappho. Sophocles. Plato. Xenophon. Marcus Aurelius. And so many others. Problem is: as I already said a few posts ago, free time is an endangered species and wanderlust is its worst enemy. And yet. In a few days, I've had the opportunity to get acquainted with the Greek alphabet, which allowed me to recognize quite a few words that have passed into the international lexicon. So I might just use that pretext to go on discovering the language and try language learning hypotheses. For instance, I just might try to LR the entire Assimil ancient Greek course, just to check if it's any use. Ah, wait. We'll see how I feel about it when the salt on my skin and the sand in my shoes have vanished. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4056 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 116 of 408 01 August 2013 at 8:35am | IP Logged | ||
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ZH
Vocabulary: purged my SRS backlogs in Anki, Pleco and Skritter. ChinesePod: started listening to a lesson about 意思的意思。 Read half a page of 早上七八点钟的太阳, then fell asleep after yet another not so believable twist in the plot. LA Read one more chapter of Winnie Ille Pu. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4056 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 117 of 408 02 August 2013 at 6:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Read one more page of the novel 早上七八点钟的太阳. In fact, I think it's silly. Anyway, I don't like it very much. I believe I'll start reading something I'm more interested in. Went through the vocabulary routine (Pleco, Skritter, Anki). Listened some more to the ChinesePod lesson about 意思的意思. GRC Listened to the first CD of Assimil ancient Greek (there are four) while following the Greek text and glancing at the translation. Have I been wasting my time? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4056 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 118 of 408 06 August 2013 at 9:44am | IP Logged | ||
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Yet another of those dreadful plateaus where it seems I'm not progressing at all, I keep starting many things while not completing any, and I have even less time than usual to devote to languages. Back to basics. As for "not progressing at all", I shouldn't look at the horizon. Whatever your pace, the horizon never seems to get closer. I should look at the next hill. And if that hill is still too far away, I should look at the next *step*. In that context, SRS is a godsend: I can do it for any length of time, one minute if I want, and absolutely anywhere. As for "starting but not completing", I shouldn't worry too much. As long as I keep doing stuff, who cares if I decide that book A is boring and I'd rather start book B or movie C, as long as I actually start reading book B or watching movie C. As for "even less time than usual", I should keep in mind that one minute of input is better than one minute of lament about not having time (because it amounts to 0 minute of input). So I did the following: INPUT: - I'm fed up with 《早上七八点钟的太阳》, so today I started a novella called 《小二黑结婚》 by 赵树理. It's in an anthology that I bought second hand titled "Reading From Chinese Writers/Textes choisis d'écrivains chinois 1919-1949," vol.2 (Foreign Language Press, Beijing, 1982). We'll see how far I can get. With each text, there is some vocabulary translated into French and English. There's some info about 赵树理 in the Chinese and English versions of Wikipedia. - On NDTV, I watched a short news item on 突尼斯 and read the transcript. - I finished the Chinese Pod lesson about 意思的意思. By "finished", I mean I did some parroting, copied, translated and retransled the lesson orally and in writing, and I did the exercices. VOCAB: - Anki: HSK lists and Cloze deleted sentences from ChinesePod - Pleco: words collected through input - Skritter: characters LA Read one more chapter of Winnie Ille Pu. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| akkadboy Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5190 days ago 264 posts - 497 votes Speaks: French*, English, Yiddish Studies: Latin, Ancient Egyptian, Welsh | Message 119 of 408 06 August 2013 at 9:58am | IP Logged | ||
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4056 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 120 of 408 07 August 2013 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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ZH
Vocab: Pleco, Anki, Skritter. Input: read some more of 《小二黑结婚》. Watched Travel in Chinese, episodes 1 & 2. A very very small victory yesterday: as I was listening distractedly to Radio Taiwan International, as I often do while walking back home from work, I could actually understand what they where talking *about* (欧洲的古堡, specifically). Now, what they were saying exactly was still beyond me. But, hey, don't spoil my joy. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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