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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 |  | |
| 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 241 of 415 14 June 2014 at 2:14am | IP Logged | ||
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As for extensive activities, I find that it's essential to do both listening and reading (and ideally LR too). Do only one and the effect is not the same at all, especially with regard to acquiring active skills.
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| 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 242 of 415 16 June 2014 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I always do both. I'm just disappointed with doing only extensive reading and extensive listening and I will explain why below.
So, I have quite a bit to report. Last Friday was the peak of frustration and I figured out how much I was wrong in believing only flipping my eyes through pages in foreign languages would improve my level. I realized I have been learning less new words a day at the intermediate stage than I did as a beginner. Sometimes I would read 10 pages in Norwegian quickly and have no 'new word' to claim I learned. Context just isn't enough when you understand too little or when the noun is concrete or even an abstract noun but with a particular nuance that would demand a more strict word in your native language as well. Therefore, I decided I'm trying my best to read slowly, linearly, one syntactical term at a time, looking up my translation right away and not going on until I've figured out the whole sentence. That is, intensively. I'm doing this at least 1 page a day for Russian and Georgian. As for Chinese, it's a little more complicated, but I will try to keep my interest as far as it gets. I tried this first on Sunday with Russian and it worked a lot. Just one page was enough to start internalizing a few words and to realize how much I was missing in terms of opportunities to memorize new words and figure out sentences I'd just stare blank at. Most of the times, I'd fail to understand a whole period due to two words that are essential but which I didn't know. When I translate these words everything else makes much more sense. I went on today with Norwegian - there weren't many new words in 10 pages of reading, but the mere fact of pausing to analize a sentence I didn't know and only moving on after figuring it out accounted for a sudden 'accomodation' of comprehension, that is, my understanding finally met my actual knowledge. I was understanding much less than I was supposed to by reading too quickly and not caring for a second read and an occasional look-up when I missed a word. Today I tracked down core words and their translation boosted up my understanding to near basic-reading fluency. I tried the same with Ylvis - no longer use it as a background activity. I would pay close attention to what the characters were saying and quickly try to relate with the English subtitles when necessary. I believe I will start to anticipate some sentences based on the subtitles. Later on, I watched intensively a video from Learn Norwegian Naturally with transcripts and had to pause and translate less than 10 words at GT. I'm more confident now. It was Norwegian who made me realize how my strategy of 'quantity' over quality learning time and of 'passive-only study'was wrong. I saw my Norwegian get completely stuck after I dropped explicit learning. A pause now for mentioning my first conversation in Norwegian since I reached the intermediate lesson. It was a Skype lesson with a new teacher at iTalki. I had trouble understanding, and I have to say I'm not having enough training and I miss having subtitles in Norwegian. Norwegian has a more complex phonology than even French, so I believe I will need much more practice and focused listening in order to improve. On the other hand, speaking was fine. It was my first time so I had some blanks, like forgetting obvious words. And that's all. I believe next time will be fair better, just like it was much better with Chinese the second time. Considering that my Norwegian is much better than my Chinese, I expect my speaking skills to advance through bounds and leaps, almost exponentially, until it stays within a more reasonable gap between the passive skills and they both start keep improving. What I have in mind is: I won't need to work now for 1 year and a half on my speaking skills the way I worked (mostly) on my passive skills during the past year and a half; in order to activate my knowledge all that I need is a couple of confident sessions. In this stage the improvement is great from one session to another. I saw this happen in French, too. I believe with 10 sessions I will be more or less 'conversational' in Norwegian, that is, I will be able to speak according to my vocabulary level. I will only be missing a lot of listening practice, because my Norwegian is not like my French: my listening skills in Norwegian are maybe low intermediate and not advanced as in French. I can't commit to doing the experiment now, I can't book other Norwegian sessions for the time being, not the required ones though, but I will report when I have the chance. Just a final comparison with French: at the previous French lesson I took last week I noticed I could understand nearly fluently and I had occasional gaps I could fill with circumlocutions, evne though I preferred to ask for translation by providing the English word just for the sake of being more precise. I may not have internalized the very same words, but the following time will be a reinforcement and then it will eventually stick. I did the same with Georgian. It was a short TED talk so I paused all the time and analized sentence by sentence, and saw an improvement. I started the book Maktub by Paulo Coelho (with a French translation), and today I finally read line by line. I saw a larger improvement than I usually do with speed-reading everything and then reading the translation. The most curious thing is that this intensity didn't represent longer reading sessions, boredom, burn-out. On the contrary: I believe it took me shorter than usual and was less boring, because I didn't have to read and then feel puzzled by not understanding enough. I believe this fits me well. Only in the case of Chinese I decided to let go reading the English original, first because they don't match and second because I'm not much interested into the content of the book The World is Flat anymore, it seems to have plenty of tautologies. That would give me extra time, so today I did stop on some specific sentences and I had a better understanding with the Chinese text. I'm reading with Pera-Pera and I only threw a paragraph at GT once. 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 243 of 415 18 June 2014 at 10:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Still getting used to the aboundance of compound verbal tenses in Estonian. I bet they
mostly translate the present perfect, the present perfect continuous and a past perfect. I asked someone who knows Finnish and he said it's not like this in Finnish. Sometimes it reminds me of passé composé or of the German past, but I believe the Estonians do use the simple past form more often, but I'm totally unsure so far. The Peace Corps manual is pretty good. It serves both for grammar input and for dialogue input. Colloquial Estonian and Manuel d'Estonien do have many dialogues, but they are not short, graded and focused as the ones from Peace Corps. I finished Speak Chinese. I will keep working on textbooks as long as there is OCR and/or pinyin. If I have to work on a textbook with only Chinese, then it's better to work on native materials on familiar topics and with OCR the way I can use Pera-pera. 'Speak Chinese', in two volumes, is a fairly good textbook. Topics are very up-to-date and intermediate: the dialogues seem authentic but still 'graded' for an intermediate level. I could decypher most texts just fine with the glossary and only got lost once or twice. Now I'm going to use "El Chino de Hoy', in Spanish, then a couple more and we'll see. I'm far from being able to just picking up a Chinese text and making sense out of it. Today I read from 'The world is flat' even slower and some words start to stick. I'm also happy with my Memrise course, about to finish level 3 in a few weeks. The words introduced are really of great use. Georgian looks also promising. I'm just avoiding translating words individually, and it's seldom necessary anyway; it's only the case when the translation is loose. I'm also reading in French and the French used seems easy, like Paulo Coelho's books overall. Now comes German: Marktplatz is due tomorrow and I'm replacing it with old TY. DOn't want to spend much time on TY German either, but now comes the issue of finding time to read in German, because so far Marktplatz had accounted for my reading in this langue. Maybe I should add a resource such as a book I don't care much about for reading semi- extensively without a translation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5056 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 244 of 415 20 June 2014 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||
There's an online Estonian course available with either English or Russian as a base language. I was curious about it myself so I had a look and it appears to be useful for the basics. It's described as 0-A2 Keeleklikk- Online Estonian Course (English Base) and seems to have some cool features:
Pode ser útil. English Base Course Demo There's also a B-1 course on Estonian History and Culture on the site's home page: Kultuuriklikk Demo I love the idea of having an actual teacher available to answer email questions. Edited by iguanamon on 20 June 2014 at 11:19pm 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 245 of 415 23 June 2014 at 4:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you iguanamon! I have just recently run into it, too. A bit confusing to
navigate, but seems to have good A1 content and now you say there's a B1 course too, that's important. I will have trouble finding A2 resources then =D Due to the audioblock, I'll leave all web-based courses for when I'm done with all textbooks, so maybe the A1 will still be useful, maybe I will start from the B1 one, who knows. These days haven't been productive, thanks to the extended holiday within the World Cup. I only studied fully on Thursday. On Fridsy I didn't study at all. On Saturday I went to the match Argentina x Iran ^^ and had to see Messi score at 48' Today I'm working parttime and so I'm not following the schedule. I resumed reading a book I barely started in German, and I'm happy with progress so far. Seems like I'll be reading in German soon. I also took the time to do Team Rare's challenge. I tried to translate a song from Georgian, not very well. Posted my translation at italki and asked for help, let's wait. I also studied Estonian. Really happy about the way things are going on. Thanks to all my previous language-learning experience, I have much less trouble with understanding syntax because I'm familiar with postpositions and postpositional cases from Georgian and with Georgian and German word order. Once you get the hang of syntax, it's mostly memorizing vocabulary and declensions. I hope my textbooks will give me a solid base so I can continue by reading native material or main sites that are available bilingually. I expect to have a shortage in resources even worse than for Georgia, for example, I don't have a newspaper reader for Estonian. Anyway, we'll see. I believe I will know what to do when I feel I'm stuck the way I was in Georgian. 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 246 of 415 24 June 2014 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's quite rewarding to be back to the routine. Went to the gym again after 6 days and I feel much better today. I could work on everything as planned even if I'd quite often stand up and gaze at the World Cup's marches on TV.
Once again I feel I'm making most progress at the language I know less of, i.e. Estonian. I like the way things are going on. I'm about to finish Colloquial Estonian and I have a good overview of the grammar, even if I didn't manage to retain much vocabulary. I have more resources now: three online courses and the Goethe-Verlag tests. Now take my best language, French. Today I watched over 10 minutes in French and read 25 pages. I don't think I have retained anything new, though. If one asks me the question "What did you learn in French today?" I wouldn't know how to answer. I'm happy with German even though I once again didn't manage to read anything after all the video sessions. That is, I didn't read in either German or Russian. I tried to work a little more intensively with Chinese so that I can reduce my daily load of Chinese videos and leave room for more. One thing worth noting is that the time you spend on reading reduces drastically from A2 to B2, for instance, but the time spent on videos remains stable, for obvious reasons. So, I believe it's not wise to fasten up my schedule with so many videos when the reading might be bringing up more results. I really don't know what to say about Norwegian. I didn't work intensively on today's videos, I missed some parts. Neither in reading - it had to happen during Italy x Uruguay. So, i'm totally clueless regarding my level. I have once again the feeling that I need to practice active skills, this time not as an end on itself, but as a way to consolidate what I'm acquiring in terms of vocabulary. That is, if I don't use the vocabulary on my own, it doesn't make sense in my mind either, even passively. I reallly should get down to writing more, even more so because I'm at a better level at all of the languages. The idea of reserving one day for active skills is appealing, but be it as it may, reading is still the first skill one realizes one learns and it's hard to let go of prioritizing it above anything until you achieve it. I'm happy that I'm almost there with German and Norwegian and cutting my practice down by 20% wouldn't make much sense either. With so many activities, I'm finally facing tough trade-offs, while I used to have more than enough time for everything. 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 247 of 415 25 June 2014 at 11:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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The day ended unexpectedly calmer. I hadto be off from my studies for almost two hours and I still manages to finish all tasks plus the videos earlier than usual. I believe no longer working on German podcasts concurs for that. I'm also a bit faster with reading my 8 pages in Chinese, some 45 minutes. Now I have 40 minutes left and I hope I can read something in German.
I'd like to write down some materials I plan to work on, by language. I collect several resources and when the time comes to choose a new one I forget about them. I still believe I should do some textbook work for French and Norwegian, working on some minor points. I just got Learn Norwegian and its learning cuirve is steep, which means the final texts serve me right at a B1 level. German - Easygerman videos Norwegian - Learn Norwegian; exercises from Goethe-Verlag Chinese - Intermediate Chinese from Routledge and/or Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar; Pride and Prejudice; Boules de Neige, Short Chinese TV Plays; Schaum's Outiline of Chinese Grammar; books from Yue Hua Estonian - there are three web courses, fro planglosskool, oneness and the one iguanamon posted above. There are also exercises for Goethe-Verlag and I need to get hold of book2's textbook. Other textbooks include TY Estonian, Manuel d'Estonien and a Russian-Estonian one I found which seems interesting. French - Grammaire progressive du français niveau avancé; recommendations on contemporary writes: Amélie Nothomb, Frédéric Beigbeder, Marie Darrieussecq, Jean Echenoz Russian - LL Advanced Russian 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4509 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 248 of 415 26 June 2014 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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You should make Youtube videos about your routine with languages, man! Seriously!
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