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Köln to Kiev TAC ’14 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4167 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 25 of 55 23 May 2014 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Not much of an update, but I did have an experience I never thought I would have. I found an Afrikaans speaker! You could say I'm somewhat surprised to not only have met someone from South Africa, but someone from South Africa who also speaks Afrikaans. It's really the first time I've been able to actually use any of the language aside from reading and listening. Very exciting! And I don't even live in a huge metropolitan area either.
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| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4167 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 26 of 55 29 May 2014 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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T-minus 10 days until Ukrainian-fest 2014. I had an ambitious goal of finishing a Polish book by the end of the month, but work and court dates kept that from happening. I'm roughly halfway through the book, and it's probably possible for me to finish it before my class starts, but not likely. I would like to keep up my other languages during the summer, but from my experience last year, I think that's going to be VERY challenging, and it might be a better idea to just completely focus on Ukrainian for the time I'm in class. I do wish that work schedules were a little friendlier towards intensive language classes; 6-8 weeks is a really good amount of time, but it's hard work just trying to block off that much time from court (luckily the court schedules move a lot more slowly in the summer). Still, it's very exciting that my legal practice is finally starting to take off to the point that it's challenging to work around the time, and I hope that at some point my language learning will be beneficial for myself and my clients.
Oh yes, and I got to speak some Afrikaans yesterday. I really don't know what it is about that language, but it's one of my favorites and I'm so excited that I finally have a human connection to the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4167 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 27 of 55 06 June 2014 at 7:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Time to get ready for my Ukrainian class which starts on Monday. I didn't do much review beforehand, so hopefully everything will go okay. Interestingly, the program has belly dancing classes every Monday afternoon (and no, I don't think I'm going to go to any!) I'll be very interested to meet my classmates and see what their reasons are for choosing Ukrainian, because this is the first time in several years it's been offered.
As for my other languages, listening is (as always) the biggest challenge. It's not so much that I have an issue paying attention, but I have the hardest time finding things I actually want to listen to for extended periods. Add in that all of my favorite shows are in English and it's an accomplishment if I get in about an hour. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4167 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 28 of 55 09 June 2014 at 9:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Day one of my Ukrainian summer: Alphabet Alphabet Alphabet. It's really good that all of us were familiar with the Cyrillic; we didn't need to spend so much time on it today. We also went over the rules for soft/hard pronunciation. This is my biggest weakness in pronunciation. It is typically difficult for me to hear the soft consonants. Our teacher spoke very slowly though, which helped to distinguish it better. Today we also learned about sentence intonation and question words. Luckily for the first day, we won't have much homework. After this week we're looking at 3-4 hours a night (almost like studying for the Bar Exam!)
I also really like that she showed us how to handwrite the Cyrillic! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6954 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 29 of 55 09 June 2014 at 10:10pm | IP Logged | ||
That should be done as a matter of course. It still bugs me a bit that our instructor did not insist that we learn how to write in Cyrillic and he tacitly supported this by printing example sentences on the chalkboard. His justification for doing so was that none of the other students knew (or wanted to learn) it (!) and that it'd take too much time to teach it (!). My God. Even though I began learning Ukrainian on my own, there was never any doubt that I would use cursive when doing assigned exercises. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4167 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 30 of 55 13 June 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Week one down. We had our test today covering interrogatives, possessive pronouns, greetings, and question words. We also needed to give a short presentation about our family. It was very basic--what their names are, who they are, what job they have, and a few adjectives.
Yesterday we watched a Ukrainian movie called Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors. It's actually something I think I should watch again; very interesting to see some of the Hutsul cultural elements. What I really liked was that there wasn't much dialogue between characters. A lot of the plot is conveyed through music and chant, which is very different from how most movies are done. Highly recommended! After our test today, we had our cooking class. We made sernyky and ordered pyrohies (and had zephyr candies as well). Good way to end the first week! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4167 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 31 of 55 18 June 2014 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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My brain is now overloaded. We just spent the first half of the day learning all about past and present conjugations combined with aspect. Some observations: it's really hard to say whether I think the Ukrainian system is more complicated than the Polish one. Ukrainian verbs fall into two groups. The problem is, we weren't really given any real guidelines on how to determine whether it's in group one or group two (though it looked like a lot of "ати" verbs were group one and "ити" verbs were group two). At the same time though, past tense is much easier in Ukrainian than Polish for me. Aspect is still a bit of a mess, but at least it isn't a completely foreign concept anymore. It's one of those things that the concept of it is pretty straightforward, but it's difficult to master. At the same time, we've been complaining the last few days that we haven't been able to use verbs, so FINALLY we get to sound like "real people."
Things that have surprised me: when we see a new word (like in song lyrics) and the stress isn't marked, I actually do a surprisingly good job of getting the correct stress the first time. The more I listen to the language, the better I'm able to hear the differences between certain sounds, including the soft consonants. On Friday we will have to talk about planning a vacation to a Ukrainian city. Should be interesting. Oh yes, and we do have required speaking time everyday. That's something I really appreciate, because it forces me to think quickly, which does not come naturally at all. So I like that I'm being pushed to improve my speaking ability sooner. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4167 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 32 of 55 20 June 2014 at 3:35am | IP Logged | ||
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Verbs verbs and more verbs. A lot of conjugation work today as well as doing more with aspect. This was followed by nominative plurals, which is a somewhat interesting idea. The nominative plural endings depend more on the stem than whether they are masculine feminine or neuter (well, not entirely true--neuter has it's own category but split up depending on the stem).
I spent several hours tonight studying for my test in the morning and working on my presentation about visiting Lviv. It's quite a task to do a presentation when you have such limited language. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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