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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 |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 225 of 415 27 May 2014 at 9:56pm | IP Logged |
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Tell me if you achieve good results, daegga! This is mostly useful for very distant languages.
Yesterday I finally started reading in Russia during workdays. I did leave it for the free time i got after watching all due videos. Reading too much in a row can easily lead to burnout. I read two pages from an Agatha Christie's book, better than zero. I finished the book 'Georgian Syntax', and here is what I wrote: This book is aimed mostly at linguists. It provides important insights into the actual nature of the Georgian grammar, according to the most recent linguistical theories: it debunks the myth of ergativity, for example. I really didn't care that much about all the linguistical constraints and used the book mostly as a source of sentences, as I was already familiar with the grammar being discussed. If you've been only through 2 or 3 Georgian grammar books, though, this book is recommended for polishing your skills and understanding of the several verbal classes and their synthatic implications. Finished La reine de lumière. Started "Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue", by Patrick Modiano. Then I plan to read some non-fiction in French. I'm starting to follow the story at 后厨, the soap-opera about restaurant kitchens. It has subtitles in Chinese only. In this case, I don't just read the subtitles or just listen to the audio; it's the combination of both that contributes to my comprehension. I even managed to pick up the lyrics of a song, the song 星座 by 王力宏. I came across one sentence at which I knew all the characters except for 1 measure word, then I manges to type it out, find the lyrics at Google and figure out the song's title and interpreter. It's a nice rap. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 226 of 415 28 May 2014 at 10:31pm | IP Logged |
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Je viens de finir de regarder le film 'Ensemble nous allons vivre une très grande histoire d'amour". Malgré le (long) titre, il m'a apparû plûtot comme une comédie. Pas mal. Ce qui j'ai apprecié le plus était le fait que j'ai presque tout compris sans sous-titres! À vrai dire, il était le film que j'ai compris le mieux sans sous-titres. Ma compréhension de l'histoire était totale, et celle du texte entourait les 90-95%. J'en suis ravi!
Today I've also finished what is my first Chinese book (even though I have more than 1 book count for the SC). I read a bilingual edition of 'The Old Man and the Sea'. I didn't really like the story that much, and I'm glad it was short. I could already see progress for my Chinese, and that's what matters. I didn't manage to find another similarly structured edition so I'll go for the combo book in Chinese + book in English. Next one I'm going to read is The world is flat. My Chinese ebook is in A4 format so I have no idea how to do page count. I'm sure it's more than 1 average page but less than 2 pages. So I may just count the pages from the English edition which is in normal book format and that will make up for everything. Today I had a long conversation with my best Georgian friend. I'm really becoming comfortable with the language. We're trying to schedule voice chat but I still don't know if I will manage to conversate in real time. Last time it didn't work out. I finished Culture Talk - Georgian today. It's an invaluable resource. One of my chriteria for choosing a language over another is whether it has Culture Talk excerpts or not. I have yet to find a resource that sounds more convenient and natural. As Georgian is moving at a faster pace now, that leaves me two 'slots' on my daily schedule. I finished 'Georgian Syntax' now and I won't start the new other by Fähnrich. It won't add much to my learning. I will leave it for later, when I need more reading in German and when I feel like becoming familiarized with Old Georgian, as more than half the book is dedicated to Old Georgian. With this, I have to say that I started learning Estonian! I couldn't help it. It's at the textbook stage, it's taking over the time I had been using for Georgian. So I hope I won't feel overwhelmed. I'm a confident B1 at least at all other languages and I'm not being introduced to linguistic novelties that demand too much consideration and a breakthrough at them; so I can do this for Estonian. I decided to go slowly and start by reading Parlons Estonien, though, since I decided to make Georgian native-materials only, I'm going to have two 'slots' for Georgian. So, I'm probably going to start Colloquial Estonian now. I'm impressed with the good Estonian books around. I was just wondering if anyone has ever used some textbooks in Russian. Not on my plans now, but if I feel I won't have learned enough from the other books, I'll go for them. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 227 of 415 30 May 2014 at 1:07am | IP Logged |
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So, I started Estonian. I continued Parlons Estonien and read the intro from Colloquial
Estonian. There's a lot going on in terms of phonology, a lot of inconsistencies too, and I hope to overcome this by listening a lot. Just have to find what to listen to :) It's ok elsewhere. Reading in Chinese took me over 1 hour for just six pages from The World is Flat. I hope the main vocabulary will start to get repeated alongside the book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 228 of 415 30 May 2014 at 9:55pm | IP Logged |
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So maybe I can make a proper update now. I spent an hour and a half reading 8 pages in Chinese. As much as I hope it will get better with time, it's still too much considering all my other tasks. I don't see what else to do, though. I'm not really memorizing new characters through reading, I'm rather recognizing more and more characters as i learn them from other sources such as Memrise.
I'm enjoying Estonian so far. I find it useful to read an interesting book such as Parlons Estonien, so that it gives me an overview of the grammar, while I slowly start building on vocabulary. Estonian isn't exactly rich on resources. There are good websites that, when the time comes, I'll have to make use of early in the morning, due to the audio/video block. I'm reading 10 pages from Parlons Estonien each day and today I did Colloquial Estonian's lesson 01. I think 1 lesson a day for whichever textbook will prevent me from spending too much time on textbooks. I want to make the learning curve smoother than it was for Georgian or Chinese. As for Norwegian, I finished the book 'En annen tid, et annet liv' which is a translation from Swedish. Now it's time for hunting. There's the NNasjonalbibliotek but all I see from modern times are scientific dissertations. Maybe I don't know how to search properly, as some people claim there are even comics there. I also got the site bookboon with short books on management, leadership that stuff...easy reading and good for the SC. Now I don't have to worry much about looking for materials and I can avoid the expensive Norwegian ebooks for a while. I'm still not confident with reading in Georgian, though I can notice I'm being consistenly presented to the same words over and over again at the TED talks, with translation. I hope they will eventually stick. My reading speed has also improved and when I decode the sounds faster I have more time to work on the meaning of each sentence while the subtitles are being displayed. The Recruit Diaries had only 13 episodes, but I've already scheduled I'm in charge. Anyway, I need to cut down on some Chinese videos, it's pretty unbalanced. I'm at the final season of Tutu and won't replace it with another cartoon. Will stick to the series I already have and focus on double subtitles (have two films scheduled, Game of Assassins and The Vietnamese Bride. I've already decided to leave all the Chinese shows for the last task of the day. I have found Norwegian videos with subtitles in Norwegian and I'm enjoying Smartscube in French, so I better work on my priorities in a wise way. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 229 of 415 02 June 2014 at 9:44pm | IP Logged |
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The weekend wasn't much productive. I read almost nothing. On the other hand, my social life was at its peak: met a lot of friends on Friday, Saturday and even on Sunday!
I am more and more conscious of how reading a non-transparent language at B1 can be real nuisance. I doubt I'm learning more from those readings than I could from textbooks. It's just too much information at once when you commit yourself to reading 5, 8 pages a day in languages at which you only understand some 25% from, or even less. I think the most efficient way would be to work really intensive in only a couple of pages each day. I believe this extensive reading only helps for reinforcing what I learn through intensive sources like SRS or textbooks. Things will only get better when I get better, thanks to other factors beyond the SC itself. As for languages I already had a consolidated B1 for, I only see improvements. These are Norwegian and German. My French is still improving a lot, btw. I'm reading 30 pages a day because I'm counting 10 pages a day from Parlons Estonien. Speaking of Estonian, this language is indeed really fascinating, even though I'm still clueless. I find it harder than Georgian now. Georgian has so many features that end up looking plain indo-european, and a much simpler nominal morphology. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6391 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 230 of 415 03 June 2014 at 2:30am | IP Logged |
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Have you tried parallel texts? Despite the obvious differences, your descriptions match my current pace in Swedish :/ One caveat is that I usually "see it" after reading the translation, ie things click all the time due to the cognates in English and German and loans in Finnish.
A popup dictionary seems like another good option :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 231 of 415 03 June 2014 at 10:03pm | IP Logged |
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All I do is parallel texts =D Not so parallel, sometimes they are perpendicular (one at the desktop, another one at the tablet. In the case of Chinese, I make use of the pop-up dictionary. It takes me almost 1 1/2 hour to read eight pages in Chinese, and this with both the translation and the pop-up dictionary. I don't know of any other pop-up dictionaries for Firefox or Chrome. A Russian one would be great, but I also need German or Norwegian.
I'm checking the page count at my Chinese copy and the English original. While I read 8 pages in Chinese, that makes 12 pages in the original English edition. I always suspected that pagecount for Chinese at the SC wouldn't be that fair... Estonian is great. Colloquial Estonian's lessons are very long, over 10 pages, and take me at least 40 minutes. I never learn intensively, but I believe I'm giving them more attention than usual. I enjoy the fact there are lots of translation exercises. The fact there is a good translator now, Tilde, besides Google Translator, helps me enough when the textbook provides texts or sentences without translation. I struggled with that during a first attempt several years ago and ended up giving up. Life got much better for the language learners in the past 4 years, that's for sure (my first Georgian year, for example, had an incipient Google Translator for Georgian and I couldn't benefit from it). Pod101's lessons go predictably all the way at the intermediate level. Only the advanced level seems to have a change in balance, with more native language. I've checked the Upper-Intermediate level for Chinese and it's still the same pattern: 1 short dialogue, some sentences and loads of explanations in English. I must admit today's first intermediate lesson had more new vocabulary than the previous one, but even so that's not a proper intermediate lesson. I'll keep going because it's an easy-to-use asset. It's a short dialogue I can work on intensively a day, both for Russian and Chinese, given that I'm mostly reading and listening extensively elsewhere. I'm a bit more confident with German thanks to Marktplatz. I need to find better reading sources for Norwegian or else it will be left behind. Just remembered now: I have those ebooks I found last week. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4960 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 232 of 415 04 June 2014 at 11:16pm | IP Logged |
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This Chinese reading is bringing me to a near burnout each day! Today it was worse because a few pages were missing in the translation. Fortunately, my overall activities are manageable now. I cut on 1 Chinese series and I'm still watching more than 1 video for all languages but Georgian. Unfortunately, I'm starting to treat these post-schedule activities as schedule and this brings up stress.
I believe it took me shorter to learn my Colloquial Estonian lesson today. I may be getting used to this. I don't expect to memorize any vocabulary but I'm enjoying the book so far. I reaffirm that the book would be unpractical if I didn't have access to the Tilde translator. I'm still far away from my Georgian epiphany, though I can understand more and more from the TED subtitles. Today I finished the French book 'Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue', by Patrick Modiano. I like his style, though there isn't exactly a 'plot'. Now I'm trying something more familiar, though, a translated book. I need to start using the forum 'Learn Norwegian Naturally'. It's one of the ways to keep my Norwegian alive. I should also try to convince someone to become an italki teacher for Norwegian. Edited by Expugnator on 04 June 2014 at 11:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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