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Expug’s All at On(c)e Log - TAC14 | ||
Tags: Papiamento | Estonian | Georgian | Native Materials | Norwegian | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Mandarin | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| milesaway Triglot Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4127 days ago 134 posts - 181 votes  Speaks: French, English*, Russian Studies: Finnish, Sign Language | Message 169 of 415 28 March 2014 at 1:00pm | IP Logged |
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Good Lord, I wish I had your planning skills. I can't even juggle two languages, let
alone 6 or 7. I'll be doing some Georgian this month and next, as I will be heading there for 3 weeks in May. I have no grand goals, just to be able to read a few signs and get around, and hopefully what I'm purchasing at the shop. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4962 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 170 of 415 28 March 2014 at 10:06pm | IP Logged |
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milesaway: good news! Hope you enjoy it! I'd like to hear about it in your log, I still haven't made my mind if I really
want to visit Georgia soon. Get the alphabet done straight away, it won't take much time and will help you get down both the International and the Russian cognates, What I can recommend you is Assimil's 'Le Géorgien de Poche' (which is an adaption from Kauderwelsch's Georgisch Wort für Wort, so, the audio from Kauderwelsch's probably works for Assimil) which is more than a simple phrasebook, plus Beginner's Georgian (which doesn't teach you much unfortunately) and to search for more conversational material online. If you want basic audio, there's the course from ice.ge but it's all in Georgian so you'd have to navigate through numbers and get the mp3 files. There's Armazi's grammar that gives you an accurate overview and doesn't overly complicates like most grammars out there. Also at Parlons Géorgien you have a good overview, it's also a sort of an enhanced phrasebook, only that it lacks audio. ====================================== So, today we had a power shortage early in the morning, which allowed me for a cold shower after the gym and prevented me from watching Tutu. I haven't given up, though. In case I don't manage to watch it after work, I've already watched XiYangYang. I think it was a wise idea, because I realized I can understand more now than before. With the appropriate context, I can understand more from XiYangYang than from Tutu, despite being amore loose context with sheep and wolves. Memrise was also missing - it requires an internet connection - and I still hope I can finish it. I started Méthode 90 Russe. Only two lessons - I forgot to bring the audio, and the lessons were too easy to bother with writing down the exercises, but I've promised to myself that I'm going to do it, 'coz that's an ultimate opportunity for activating my Russian. I'll keep working on two lessons till it becomes too hard again. I had the second part of a lecture on copyrights, which was actually part of work but came in handy. I have several doubts solved for whenever I decide to publish something and need to quote native material. Besides, I got a contact in case I need consulting. Now, I should thank Chung once again for presenting me to Culture Talk! I started it for Georgian, and it is going to work wonderfully! The texts/videos are short but straight to the point. People speak very fast but decyphering the sound is possible, and actual comprehension speed will come with time, I know. Also, the fact that the lessons are mostly short allowed me to do two in a row, which I will try as much as possible to do. That means it will take me 'only' three months to finish this resource. Speaking of speed, I really improved reading in Norwegian and Georgian. I'm reading extensively in Norwegian quite fast, and following the story properly. As for Georgian, I'm almost at a level at which I can follow the subtitles in Georgian and in Portuguese without worrying about pausing for decyphering stuff. Since I mentioned subtitles, I ran into this guide on how to watch with 2 subtitles at a time (the point of my TediSubs app, but which i'd like to extend for movies in general). Will give it a try at a calmer day. It's not necessary for languages like Norwegian but I could use both approaches for Chinese and do need this one for Russian. I'd like also to mention this Tilde Translator develop specially for the Baltic languages (regardless the family) and which claims to do a much better job than GT. Good news for someone who wants to start Estonian! Today I might have had a better time at understand the French film Tais-toi without subtitles. I have to keep trying. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4962 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 171 of 415 31 March 2014 at 10:26pm | IP Logged |
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The weekend
It was a productive weekend! One that didn't miss hanging out, chilling, meeting friends, but also saw some language learning. Kept up with Anki and Memrise in both days, as well as with Tuttle Flashcards. Finished one book which is not language- related. Watched one episode of Tutu at the tablet! It works better and the ads run for a short time, sometimes no ads even. Also, Hewitt's A Structural Grammar is now a thing of the past. I regard this book as the best work from Hewitt so far. It is a reference work, and does well its job. OTOH, even the final reading excerpts are better on it than at the other works: better laid out, with literal translation and normal translation. Funny how he managed to be more didactical in a work that was meant for linguists, so he didn't need to be that ditactical. Still the sample sentences that betray a disdain for Georgian, but I've learned to cope with that. It's a book to keep closer to you because it is among the easiest ones where to find that specific verb form you need to learn. On Sunday afternoon, I tried to join Sharedtalk or talk at Skype, but no luck. No contacts online for my languages at Skype; at Sharedtalk's voicechat, everyone was already engaged; at the text chat, same as Skype. I only managed to talk some Chinese with a girl from Vietnam. she was kind and helpful but I was already running out of time back then. All in all, I'm suffering from a lack of practice for my target languages and this is part of today's rant (watch out, it's coming) after three months in 2014. My wife and I resumed English classes which were cut out from Monday evenings since I started working full-time. We kept working on the textbook and after 1 hour we decided to go for music. So I introduced her to Lyrics Training and she liked it a lot! I decided to give it a try later (for French) and, while my listening skills aren't that bad, I've come accross so many unknown words in the pop, mainstream songs I found that I may suspect my French is far from fluency after all. This morning I couldn't sleep properly and didn't wake up really well. Fortunately, I just got a 10 minutes more rest and could stand up and do everything as planned: gym, groceries, study. Most of the times a short rest consisting of just lying on my bed trying to forget about time will be enough for me to recover and keep working. I don't use any medidation techniques and never did, but I'm working on emptying my mind all by myself sometimes. I like the results so far: I used to have a strident roar when I was younger and now I manage to focus more often. Memrise took a hell of a time again. I had 130 items to water - I should have done more watering last evening. I decided to do the new chapter first, and yet I finished it all at just about time to leave home. I even left Anki and Tuttle's flashcards to finish later (which I already did). Tutu is even easier to follow, technically speaking, now that I opened it at the tablet. I leave the tab open with the links to the whole first season. Content-wise, I am more and more attached to the story and understand a good deal to have some fun with, in spite of the occasional blanks that make me thirsty for more cultural references. Daily routine and trimonthly evaluation It is not something I've done before, but rant got to a point at which I need to let some thoughts out a bit. I've realized how long I've been at the game and how little I've achieved in terms of profficiency, which probably tells a lot about how little efficiency my studies have represented so far. My most urgent decision is to try to focus a bit more intensively at each activity, not doing them just en passant. Even if I can grasp the meaning, it is important to take a look at how the sentence is built, that is, doing the job of literal translations Assimil does on its own (and which I would sometimes skip nonetheless). I'm still not impressed with my lack of efficiency and I sense it has something to do with not going to the essence of the things. I also have to work around my lack of people to practice with for most languages, and my lack of motivation for practicing for others. I realize that that "speak from day 1" euphoria only leads you so far as to a tourist level conversation, and all in all, the only language at which I haven't reached this level yet is Russian. Yet doing this repetitive talk is still the door for more complex conversations, as the recent conversations with the Georgians I've become acquainted with have shown. All in all, I'm still focusing too much on input. I am gathering interesting information from different places, not only from language-learning, but even those thanks to language-learning to some extent, and I'm not being able to talk about it with people. I'd like to have deeper conversations about interesting topics. You know, "papo de boteco" (a bar's talk) as we would say in Brazil. As much as this momentum is something hard to achieve - even more now that I do this less and less often - I still feel egoistical for reading so much and not using that knowledge to interact with other people and share experiences. I still have mostly superficial context while seemingly buried in my own world. On the other hand, it is hard to write about one's experience and not let it sound like bragging/conversion attempt/a polyglot's euphoria. Well, all that I've been doing at this log does not seem meaningless. I just miss writing and talking about the subjects I love instead of just cramming in books. I miss carrying on a significant project like when I used to work on music from all over the world. That is, giving back what the world is so gently offering me. I'm just accumulating treasures on my own while giving back too little or nothing at all. Since everything has multiple sides, I also don't want to start working on something just for the sake of self-recognition and appraisal. There's also that perfectionism bug that prevents me from doing a lot of things. It's also a matter of finding a balance between input and output - right now, as I said earlier, output keeps the bad quality time, and it's always easy to keep adding input activities that are also fun Now it's time to stop wandering and use pratical examples to demonstrate to which extent I am worried about my lack of efficiency at language learning. Chinese I've started Chinese at June 2011. I've studied approximately 1 1/2 year (I consider one year to consist of 200 workdays) for 15 minutes a day, then another six months for half an hour and since then Ive been working on textbooks, podcasts and native materials for about 1 hour a day. I can't evaluate my current level in Chinese, as I can't for any other languages, but only now I've started to read a book in Chinese. I should have started earlier at least with Chineese Breeze. Anyway, I did have a tough time with textbooks, and yet my level is low. I can't keep a conversation (lack of islands?), I can figure out sparse phrases from a video (a little more with subtitles) and, as much as I feel all my work wasn't in vain, I always have the feeling I could be employing my time better, and it's not merely a quality x quantity issue. I gave a hint above that I need to try to understand the input in a more systemic way - actually I should consistently keep on analyzing and summing up the input so that I understand it in a more dynamic way which is how language actually takes place. Just like Assimil again: you have analysis - word by word translation - and syntesis - idiomatic translation and it's the combination of both that accounts for the understanding and the preparation for the learner to be able to produce the sentence himself later. Well, most of the times, I've work on at least one of those aspects very poorly. As much as I've always assumed I was a visual learner, I also think I need the acoustic image of a sentence to reverberate in my mind so that I can internalize it. It's hard to explain that, but I need to approach each sentence in a way that I really want it to become a part of my memory, of my repertoire; I need to tell myself I want this very sentence to become one of the ways I can express myself and understand the world through. That can't be done with a quick glance at original and translation, no matter how fast I can "read" (that is, decypher sounds only). Georgian My frustration with Georgian is bigger than with Chinese. I know that the issue with bad-quality materials plays a big roler, but even when I found a good source I'd still work too fast on it. Even if I don't like to overlearn or to review stuff, at least that first and unique approach should be slow enough for the information to sink in. It doesn't suffice that I'd rationally understood a sentence; I need to be able to think of how I would have said it myself in the language. That includes talking to oneself when going through the sentences and imagining the context at which that very sentence would actually be said by me or by another person. So, I started Georgian in January 2012, the first two years for 30 minutes a day and since then for approximately an hour, too. Georgian, more than Chinese perhaps, makes it clear to me that I learn in an onion or a spiral pattern. 1) I study phonology, basic vocabulary and simple sentencves in the past tense 2) I proceed to more advanced tenses before I've mastered the basic stuff 3) I start to deal with intermediate grammar while still lacking the intermediate vocabulary 4) I'm more comfortable with grammar now; I start native materials and I see there are so many words that I've seen before but I still don't know 5) Now it's pointless to go through all the books again; I have to work on native materials and expect the knowledge gaps to be filled little by little. I am at this stage now: my active skills are almost at B1, but when I come to a real text there's no real "graded reader" for selecting only the words a learner would typically have met. So, it turns out that I can say more than I can understand, because when you know half the words you can paraphrase a lot and get your point through, but you can't make the other half out out of context. Russian I'm much less harsh on myself about Russian, because I've always treated it as of a lower priority. I started it at November 2011 and I've been doing 15 minutes a day until now, when I might have reached half an hour a day (well, there were some three or four months when I was using Russianpod that also accounted for half an hour a day). If I keep at this rythm I will soon be able to understand Russian better than Georgian; on the other hand, my Georgian skills are existent and my Russian ones aren't, which is self-assuring, considering how much more I've invested on Russian. Now that some Russian aspects stopped being a nuisance, like phonology, and I start to be able to tell some long words apart from one another, it's time I work again on setting the foundations of declension and verbal aspect, so I can start making my own sentences in the language. I really hope the onion-learning pattern applies to Russian, because it means that with a few more layers of basic study I will manage to overcome a lot at ocne: basic vocabulary, declension, word order and aspect. I've started Méthode 90 for Russian, and I believe it will help activating my Russian. The exercises involve output and are short enough to keep myself motivated. By the way, I saw the software Russian for all and I think it is ok for doing those fill-in-the-blank exercises which are so boring to do with pencil and paper. I managed to install it at both places and plan to work on it as a post-schedule activity, after the Chinese reading and TV series I seldom find time for. Norwegian The one that puzzles me the most. I don't know if my Norwegian is already functional. I can watch a TV series and laugh when reading the subtitles, yet I may read a contemporary novel and miss the context thanks to so many unknown words. I have the feeling my input wouldn't be that bad, and the interference with German has diminished a bit. Yet I expected to be closer to basic fluency now. I keep forgetting some core words which I look up rather often. French Considering reevaluating my French. I'm watching a film without subtitles after three ones with subtitles and I'm not sure if I have basic fluency yet. I browsed through the lyrics of pop music and saw lots of unknown words. I still have a hard time reading a contemporary novel that is set in the Middle Age. Oddly enough, I feel my written skills might have improved a bit as I've started to do less spell errors and to get a ear for what sounds non-native. I'm not sure if I've reached a passive B2, though. The medicine has already been prescribed long ago: writing more and more often. The Rencontres Francophones haven't taken place in town lately, and I don't Skype either. I wonder if I should so some intensive learning again. The other languages are ok: with German, it's too soon for me to develop any expectations after this year's fast restarting; yet I start to feel that the newer words aren't sticking anymore. Papiamento is mostly a fun time. So, enough rant. While I'm still worried that my learning has been quite ineffective, I still believe things will stick all at once, in a way that I will sense some epiphany for each sublevel within each language. The mere fact I work in a systematic way doesn't help the fact that learning actually happens in a caothic way, and most of my activities have been thought as a way to favor synergy among them. I urgently need to start delving into materials with intuition and aural perception, instead of just reading and mostly through skimming. I need to process what is being heard and read so that I apprehend it as part of my repertoire, instead of barely moving on as long as the main point has been made. After all, I need to internalize structures before being able to spit them out. Some people are satisfied with being parrots during the first months; not me. And not when I've actually worked on the active skills beyond the parrot time and when what I actually need is to fill in the many knowledge/competence gaps left behind. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4154 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 172 of 415 31 March 2014 at 11:07pm | IP Logged |
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Passive and active skills are the unequal balance of my language learning.
I have the same belief that things will stick all at once, because it has happened to me before and because I need it to continue through a confusing jungle of words and concepts in my head. Otherwise I would have stopped several months ago. That wasn't really a rant. It was very focused. So you owe us a good, all over the place rant :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4428 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 173 of 415 01 April 2014 at 1:51am | IP Logged |
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Well, I'm not so good at being focused as you are always but I'll try.
As Renaissancemedi said, Passive and active skills are always unequal. I think we have probably all gone through that same feeling of frustration for not being able to express what we know we can understand. I know I have at least. For your Chinese, don't underestimate yourself. You definitely have a really good base and even more than just a base. Regarding your troubles for speaking, I'd say just go for it and try. I know I understand less than you (you said yourself that Travel in Chinese and Tutu are getting easier to understand and me I need to concentrate on the subs or I almost won't understand anything) and yet when I arrived here I had a 4-5h talk in Chinese the very first day. When you don't have a choice, you'll find a way to express yourself. Maybe go to some kind of polyglot meeting or couchsurfing meeting or even find a chinese partner and decide to only speak chinese, no matter how hard it is. You'll see great results. As for reading, as you know, there's no miracle remedy. Just go on doing your thing. Now that you've started reading, you'll get good really fast considering the amount of vocabulary you already have. As you said, it'll click at one point. I was kinda surprised you "ranted" about Norwegian. Your progress for this language was one the impressed me the most. You've been learning it for about a year and a half right? That's incredible progress! Quant à ton Français, les rares fois où je t'ai vu écrire en français, j'ai été impressionné. L'usage des mots, des expressions et conjugaisons sont quasi tous parfaits. Ne t'inquiètes pas de ne pas être à l'aise avec des textes sur le Moyen-Âge, même pour nous autres Français, bien qu'on puisse les lire, les tournures de phrases nous parraissent étranges et il peut même arriver qu'on ne comprenne que le "sentiment" d'une phrase et qu'on ne soit pas à même de "traduire" ça en Français moderne. Go on, I'm sure you're the only one not satisfied with your levels ;) And if you want to share, do it here, go or into the wild, you'll find people listening in both cases :) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4962 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 174 of 415 01 April 2014 at 9:55pm | IP Logged |
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Well, I really don't expect I'd feel like ranting all over the place ;)
I may leave the impression that I'm progressing more than I actually am. just completing a book doesn't mean I've mastered it. I tend not to overlearn, on the contrary; I may go through a book and retain almost nothing from it. I finished monolingual textbooks for Norwegian that are meant for C1 level, but I might still be at a B1 level. I think you misunderstood me for Tutu and Travel in Chinese, yuhakko. I can understand parts of it thanks to both the subtitles and the speech. I don't have an easy time at all. I do believe there's some dormant vocabulary waiting to be reinforced and lately consolidated. Let's see how the next months will come by. Morning Today was the day I got the most from Tutu. His parents were trying to teach him to swim. I could follow most of the story as well as what he usually says at the end, an advice to other kids. As for Memrise, HSK 2 is over. I only have some watering to do later and tomorrow I start HSK 3. If it's too repetitive, I may not do watering, only do planting faster. Daily schedule Following yesterday's notes, I tried to study in a more concentrated way, actually paying attention to associate words and meanings. I realized Chinese and Russian podcasts both take a lot of time. I'm spending my first half hour on them, which includes reading (Chinese has average 6 and Russian has 8 pages). The good news as of today is that the Georgian studies are taking shorter and allowing myself to go through them with more attention, not getting bored with too long excerpts. I studied two videos from Culture Talk. They were quite interesting and useful, only that audio got lost when it wasn't the interviewer who was talking. The conversation sounds quite natural and idiomatic, and I really expect to learn a lot from it. And it's just a short video on a daily topic plus transcriptions in Georgian and translation in English. You see it doesn't take much to make a good language resource, yet people want to reinvent the wheel and sell off so many false, dumbed-down methods. I forgot to mention that I started reading Kurze Grammatik der Georgischen Sprache in German. The first page was a bit more tiresome but then it got into more familiar stuff and today I found it quite useful. I could read on familiar topics while learning some abstract German words in a more consistent way. I'm still on the introduction and I hope I can get to actual Georgian grammar soon. I hope this book will come up with some good sample sentences and will help me consolidate grammar so that I don't have to worry about looking things up all the time and so that I can make sense out of just a text and a translation in a more reliable way. Stuyding from Perfectionnement Allemand, on the contrary, has been quit etime- consuming. It seems both this one and Méthode 90 for Russian took over the time I recovered from Georgian. At Perfectionnement I spend a really good deal learning notes. I just skim through them, and yet it's quite many minutes. I find it ganz useless to have notes that outnumber the actual content of a lesson (28 notes in a lesson with 18 paragraphs, while the text of the notes is longer as well). I've just posted a topic at which I ask how each person deals with the notes at an Assimil book. Anyway, although the notes are a nuisance now, my German study is going well. I'm currently at lesson 22 at Perfectionnement Allemand and I'm reading that Georgian grammar I mentioned above. I think Pefectionnement Allemand's lessons are getting easier with time and I'm able to follow them quite comfortably. I'm orphan of a Norwegian series again. Nattskiftet har endet i dag (d.v.s. jeg har nettopp sett episoden 12). Som det var morsomt! Hele serien handler om gale fyrer som jobber på en bensinstasjon. Nå vet jeg ikke hva jeg skulle se. Det finnes Hjem (men med svenske undertekst) og Helt Peffekt (uten undertekst). Jeg skulle heller laste ned applikasjonen til NRK og se på dagens programmer, men det vil ikke virke på min gamle tablet med iOs 5.1, bare på den nye som jeg forlater alltid hjemme. Å, det er også 'I kveld med Ylvis'! Det er mange videoer med engelske undertekster, og nå at norsken min blir bedre, kanskje skulle jeg forstå spøkene rask nok. I'm trying my best with Russe 90. Going slower than usual, paying attention to the sentences being repeated, writing down exercises that ask to translate into Russian and doing mentally the fill-in-the-blank ones. I'm really more comfortable with Russian phonetics aftert the previous book, and that leaves room to give morphology a better look. That is, it was much harder to focus on the endings when they all seemed to blur to my eyes. And even if that is actually the case quite often (with adjectives, for instance), now I have a better idea of when this will happen, so I can understand when the ending changes only in writing and when pronunciation should also do the distinction. This was something that has put me off in Russian and I'm glad I've overcome it. Plans for the future: I'm slowly starting to write at my target languages. Still haven't solved the issue with availability for voice chat sessions, but at least I see some improvement in my Chinese listening and it's becoming real fun to watch Chinese TV. I want to keep working on the supplementary resources whenever possible while trying to find more opportunities for practice, even if that means only text chatting. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4962 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 175 of 415 02 April 2014 at 10:50pm | IP Logged |
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Not much happened today. Watched Tutu in the morning, started a new Memrise - HSK 3 -
which still consists mostly of reviewing. I decided I'll try not to water the chapters that consist only of reviewing. Instead, I will try to do two chapters a day when possible. I should say first that yesterday, after posting here, I managed to do a lot of activities. I chatted at Sharedtalk with a Norwegian who works at a travel agency and is learning Spanish and Portuguese. We text-chatted for almost an hour in Norwegian and I didn't need to switch to English in order to explain anything. He would correct occasional tips, but also complimented me for my Norwegian. And I seldom would have to translate my thoughts. Later that day I also finished one story from Chinese Reading Practice and watched a bit more from the Chinese series from 后厨. I had also chatted in Norwegian and Italian in another chat. I believe I'm getting a bit more of practice at that. I had an idea last afternoon that I should have had earlier in order to overcome the lack of 'Papiamento' as a language choice at communities such as italki and Lang-8: I searched for people from Aruba and The Netherlands Antilles! I had several results at italki, but unfortunately it's all people who haven't been active lately and so I didn't get any replies so far. As a revanche, I joined most groups labelled under Papiamento at FB.The one which is active is in Dutch, but I'll keep an eye on it nonetheless. This morning I tried voicechatting but I'm having this issue that all 'positions' are taken at SharedTalk, and usually one person shows up as available at the menu only because the number turns even. A Russian contacted but we couldn't hear each other well. Perfectionnement Allemand's notes were boring as usual. Russe 90 was quite nice, I'm really filling in the gaps in my knowledge of Russian. The Fench saga that takes place in the Middle Ages is the least expected moment of the day, while I'm about to finish the Norwegian book 'Beatles', although I'm not getting much from extensive reading. I'm really curious how my understanding will be for the next Norwegian book. Speaking of Norwegian, I started the series 'Hjem'. Unfortunately the subtitles are in Swedish, and I realized it's not a good enough crutch. I do get to understand something from the Norwegian sound, but I've been watching the series extensively and as a result I'm not following as much from the plot as I've been used to. There are also some gaps in my collection - episodes 4, 6 and 7. If all goes wrong, I go for Ylvis then films. I believe I don't need series that much now anymore. I can 'downgrade' Norwegian to 10 minutes a day from a film, as I do with French. I'm glad my active skills aren't that weak. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4962 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 176 of 415 03 April 2014 at 10:45pm | IP Logged |
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Over 14 years ago, when I started learning languages, I expected that when I turned 30
I'd have become a polyglot. I thought I'd be working on close languages such as the big 5 (English, Spanish, French, German, Italian) all that time and then I'd be able to consider myself a polyglot, even if I'd still be eager for more. I also expected I'd have a comfortable life, a place to live etc. The day has come, and, as much as I know that I don't exactly have a career and ended up doing nothing like what I went to uni for, I have a feeling of self-accomplishment. I learned to know myself and to understand others. And I do have a solid job now, and not only that, it allows me to work on my favorite job that is languages. I learned to dance, to have a healthy lifestyle, to be more tolerant. And I resumed my language learning in the most intense, rewarding and self-motivating way I could ever imagine. The most important feeling to get rid of now is to think about 'lost time'. Yes, there are people who started at 16, too, and have a better time, with better resources, a more connected world and a lot of advice on the pitfalls of wanderlusting, posing and such. Yet I think these years weren't a waste at all. I did miss a lot due to not being aware of the importance of regularity, but when I stopped, I did stop, so, every clock apart from the biological one stopped running. I may think I 'wasted' the best years of my memory's capacity because I didn't manage to learn 3, 4 languages to fluency when I was a highschool student, but the best part of my life is yet to come. The more I learn, the more I become interested and sometimes knowledge seems to grow exponentially as we start to make connections. The learning process itself, on the other hand, happens in a spiral, not linearly. And that is when 14 years of reflections teach us that time is not wasted and our brain isn't a think tank that just has to be filled with wordlists. The way I studied German and Russian prove that. At one given point, I just didn't seem to be ready for the extra knowledge I was supposed to achieve. I had to live other aspects of life to allow me that broader view that would work as the background for more acquisition. At one point, languages ceased to make sense for themselves, and I ceased to work on them. Only later I could go back to them, when I realized the appropriate role it had to have in my life. For a few years, they had been a way to escape, an excuse for procrastinating on the most essential things. Now they are a prize for a balanced life. If I can work on my languages now, it's because I learned to work on what is essential in my life, and to be patient and indulgent with the many paths life takes. If I wake up tomorrow and realize I won't have time to work on languages as intensively as I am now, I'll feel fine, because I'll know the various techniques to make a better use of my time. Most important, I'll have already harvested the fruits that language learning brought me: I can already read and watch a range of works in a few languages: so, nothing would have been in vain anymore, not the way it was when I just dabbled and didn't make much progress. I really need to let go of the past. I write in a spiral, too, going back and forth, while what I am really trying to do is forgive myself for the 'wasted time' and convince myself that 30 is still early and that I can work on my major languages comfortably as well as dabble in a few others. It's not that I'd have progressed linearly if I had kept working since 2000. I needed a lot of things to happen, both internally and externally, a number of paradigm shifts: a life, a job, a better attitude, a multitude of resources/apps that didn't exist back in 2000 and, most of all, a supporting, friendly, hardworking community like HTLAL. I have been on other communities for a long time, but people didn't take themselves or the others serious enough. Again, maturity also played a role on this. So, now that I know I've learned more in the past three years than in 5 years during my first attempt, I should also admit that what I learned at the first 'season' did set the background, especially linguistically, for what would come later - back in 2012, when I started Georgian, I had already satiated my linguistic curiosity, so it was not like 'Oh I'm going to start Warlpiri tomorrow because I find it trendy' anymore. Dabbling was buried, commitment could grow fully and take the place it should always have had in my life, which I'd often neglect thanks to a wrong mindset. I did lose something important in the past two years: the fear of success, at least in the language learning field. It was quite embarassing to have people say "look, this guy is a polyglot" only to deny and say "no, my English is not fluent, my Spanish is just average portuñol and I can read French and Italian". Laypeople always mistake being studying a language for speaking a language. Now when people say I'm a polyglot and ask me which languages I speak I don't have to feel outraged for carrying on a reputation I don't deserve. Now after only two years I can say "I speak English, French, and Papiamento fluently and I can get by in Norwegian, German, Georgian and Chinese". No more identity crisis. I don't have to feel bad about myself for having a hobby that doesn't actually represent usable knowledge. Now, the future. I do like to make plans for the future. I allow myself not to let them turn into an obsession. We should have something to offer to life, as much as it may give something else back. What we plan are trends, and we should be able to adapt according to those trends. Fortunately I've dabbled enough: Spanish, French, Italian, German, Norwegian, Serbian, Georgian, Mandarin, Papiamento, Syriac, Turkish, Polish, Russian, Esperanto, Estonian, Indonesian, Inuktitut, Sami, Czech, Catalan, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Persian, Tetun, Dutch...I know what's priority and what's not, and what is ruled out. One more thought, resuming what I wrote two days ago: I need to give back all that life is giving me. To stop being selfish and to do more for the others, or at least write my two grains of advice. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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