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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 353 of 415 07 November 2014 at 8:13pm | IP Logged |
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I've noticed something - when you think you're making good progress at a language, in terms of comprehension, of sentences popping up in your head, you start to get a little bit sick of textbooks and their predictability. This happens at about halfway the A2 stage. I feel this strongly for Russian - as a matter of fact, I'm already using native materials but today the Assimil Perfectionnemment seemed so 'slow', I mean, I could be enjoying other stuff, like the Night Watch/DayWtch book/film series I had heard about and read about today again. The same happens to Estonian, but since I haven't started native materials for it yet, it's rather the feeling of anxiety about putting my knowledge to work.
It seems we learn with mistakes and my Estonian is at a much more solid stage after 6 months than Georgian, Russian, Mandarin or even Norwegian were. I won't fall for the trap of letting go of explicit, guided learning while it is still necessary, though. I believe I'm better off now to find out which genre of materials I need when I start native materials. For example, resources that work deeply with conversation concur with native materials, but they are easier, of course. I had better not waste them all at once at a rapid rhythm when I'm not sure I have mastered this. Example: Georgian. I went through all of my textbooks, one lesson at a time, before I started native materials. Now I know I should have saved some of them for now, because I need them for reinforcing and activating the basic conversation skills. There's no such thing as an Assimil Perfectionnement for it, and the closest to it was a course entirely in Georgian that claims to go up to B2 level. Well, I should have saved the B2 level for now. When I was studying from it, it kept being over my head, especially when it comes to vocabulary. I believe I should have started with native materials for easy, translated texts first. Then when I got back to that course I wouldn't feel I was learning so much new from it, I would rather consolidate the most important words and learn the other - half, for instance. When it comes to less common languages, the use of materials has to be decided from an economical approach. Well, even in the case of Chinese, I feel the need of a resource consisting of short texts with translation and audio now - when I used the ones I have, they were also above my level. I should just take care not to make with Estonian the same mistake of spoiling the best resources when they aren't at an optimal point of your learning curve. This is critical for someone who doesn't like reviewing - or worse, having a software tell you when to review what ;) Anyway, I'm getting to a point at which all native materials start to be slightly enjoyable for my languages. I can make much more sense out of them. Even the German book I'm reading, that is hard thanks to the subject, was better-going today. I was more relaxed, too. Yesterday I met a friend from the US, from an online chatroom. He is staying in Brazil for a few months. We talked some Mandarin (he has Chinese ascendance) and Swedish/Norwegian, besides English and Portuguese, obviously, but we also talked a lot about differences in urban planning, cost of living between the US and here and about music. He became interested in everything Brazilian after listening to a song by Elis Regina. Deutsch Direkt is too elementary. I believe it will get harder in a few days, though, since it has no subtitles at all. I'm doing much less in Chinese than before, but it's quality over quantity. I mean, I kept most of the materials and didn't add new ones for replacing the ones that ended - one TV series from Guangdong, Chinesepod and Tutu will end soon. But now my understanding is better and I can learn more from each resource. You know that feeling when you go from a stage where you only understood/related 20% of the words in Chinese/translation and now the ratio improved to 50%? That does not only mean you learned 3 out of the 10 words in each sentence, but since only 5 obscure ones remains instead of 8, you can also give more attention to these 5 remaining ones and so you get to know them mnore efficiently now. That is, as you progress and increase your vocabulary, your efficiency for learning new words also increase. I' was having a simila rdiscussion at lorinth's log. This isn't linear, but this isn't exponential either. (And this is when many languages fail, they assume that only because you learned the present tense in the first two lessons you can now learn 50 new owrds a day instead of 10). When done at the appropriate rhythm, this strategy of learning words can be efficient but also motivating and less boring than, say, SRS. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4068 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 354 of 415 07 November 2014 at 8:55pm | IP Logged |
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To comment on your penultimate post, the language used in Les Visiteurs is not exactly slang: it's a voluntarily inaccurate parody of medieval French. I was going to say that it's not very useful language to communicate with today's French speakers but, in fact, the movie was so successful that some lines are well known and widely used. I sometimes tell my wife or my kids, tongue in cheek, "Mangeaillons mon Jacquouille!", a sentence which comes directly from the movie.
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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 355 of 415 08 November 2014 at 2:29pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks! This medieval language I'm more aware of, no wonder I couldn't find some (and,
even more impressive, I did find some). I was thinking of the slang said by Dame Béatrice and her husband, the dentist. They do use some unusual words, so I'm learning a lot. Many thanks for the insight on the lines of the film being widely used. Like emk, I'm really fond of the Francophone mass culture, and that alone would already be a good reason for learning French, not to mention the high prestige culture of course. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| lorinth Tetraglot Senior Member Belgium Joined 4068 days ago 443 posts - 581 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish, Latin Studies: Mandarin, Finnish | Message 356 of 415 08 November 2014 at 5:05pm | IP Logged |
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Just as in the English culture, there are some famous French comedies that fed the everyday language with memorable one-liners. On the top of my head "Le père Noël est une ordure" is the winner here. There's also the older "Les tontons flingueurs" and many other.
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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 357 of 415 10 November 2014 at 8:38pm | IP Logged |
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Now you made me want to watch Le Père Noël est une ordure...and it's been only a few months. When I watched it, I even noticed one excerpt from the soundtrack that reminds me of Daft Punk's Get Lucky (the melody is similar), so I believe such references may be spread throughout French pop culture.
=========== It turns out that I'm finishing my activities 1-2 hours earlier. I did everything and even watched a 40-min episode of an American series, which I don't count as studying languages anymore, it's some sort of a reward. Lat Friday I even read a 3-page long news story in Georgian, which added up for the SC and, what's more, I could understand it quite well, way better than I do with translated fiction. Now I have plenty of time to write here (even went through the forum for today already). A side-effect: I'm still getting more tired than usual, again this might have to do with a lot of reading. After watching the episode, I feel a bit more alert, so maybe we have a pattern now: to wait till I've had this leisure time before thinking of doing something else on my languages. Not doing any SRS for the moment. I have to figure out what to do about my Chinese. As a matter of fact, what I need the most are output exercises involving sentences. If it weren't for the fact I'm already taking the Goethe-Verlag tests for Russian, I'd start them for Chinese. There is the Chinese learning app I can use at home, all I have to do is remember to use it to replace the SRS I'm not doing anymore. Today I read several sentences in a row with Pera Pera before resorting to translation. As a matter of fact, Chinese is somehow better than Russian and than Georgian now (well, I'm sure if I had a pop-up dictionary for Russian and Georgian they would be as learner-friendly). Following up on my plan for reserving the most fun/commercial/easily found books for the most difficult or hard to find languages, I may read Dan Brown's books in Chinese, since I couldn't find them for Georgian. I'd be glad to buy some ebooks for Chinese as long as I can read them in a browser with Pera-pera, but it seems the Chinese market is still incipient and messy. There's stuff on Amazon.cn but that will require the Kindle app which wouldn't allow me for a pop-up dictionary. If there is anyone who can give me additional info on this, please do. Maybe I'm missing something. Speaking of ebooks. There's a lot in Estonian. A friend from the forum just pointed me into the direction of several free ebooks. The new, commercial ones do cost 15 to 20 euros each, so I will buy with parcimony. Right now I'm signing up to an Estonian e-bookstore to figure out how to download and open its free ones. I'm filling a form for the first time and learning new vocabulary! Wanderlusting. As my CGR group of languages gets better at a consistent stage and since Estonian is going far better than expected, I must admit I'm tempted to start a new language. Indonesian and Turkish are still on the list for starting over, Italian in the group of the ones I'd proveide a head-start for. I'm still cautious as the past weeks have been a bit stressful since I dealt with comprehensive textbooks with longer lessons. Maybe I should be sure I'd be able to reduce my amount on either German or Norwegian, or both, especially in terms of reading, so I could save more time and mental energy for starting a new language. 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 358 of 415 11 November 2014 at 8:53pm | IP Logged |
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Found all of Dan Brown's books in Chinese. Now I can start in chronological order. Will hurry up with The Time Traveller's Wife then. Today I realized the Chinese version of TTTW is abridged, so I didn't even bother reading further from the original till I found the matching pages, as I do with Jules Verne in Georgian/French. The good thing: I can follow the story only by using Pera-pera for the characters I know, which means I can already make good sense out of the Chinese sentence. Anyway, can't wait to try Dan Brown's books and I hope they are easy.
Also found loads of books in Estonian. They include Jules Verne, Agatha Christie and several other translations, the stuff I am used to reading in Georgian and Russian. Great news! There are enough books for completing Super Challenges up to 2021. I started reading Norwegian books on management and career. They are great for non-fiction, as such books usually lack substance and thus are easy. You get to learn several highly-frequent abstract words such as initiative, leadership, confidence, motivation, creativity, independence. These are important words to be learnt because most of them will have Germanic roots in Norwegian (often cognates with German), instead of the English/Romance cognates we're used to. I downloaded these ebooks for free from bookboon.com . There are 1.000 of them, enough fuel for Norwegian too. Sample: Det innebærer å utvikle ferdigheter som å overvåke din egen oppførsel. It involves developing skills to monitor your own behavior. From this sentence alone you would hardly say English and Norwegian are related languages. And these are all high-frequency words. Hence my emphasis on learning some abstract words soon, because it would boost your reading. Btw, I also downloaded fiction books, those that are available for free from digitalbok.no now and then. Got 4 new ones today. Reading speed in Papiamento: less than 1 minute per page. No words looked up in two pages. (I only read two pages a day because there is only one novel left and I don't want it to end soon). Also, at today's short news excerpt I could understand a lot as almost as if I was listening to background TV in Portuguese (that is, I'm still listening to Papiamento in the background and I still see progress in comprehension). Yesterday I said I was working faster with my studies, up to one hour faster. It turns out that I'm getting hungry one hour earlier too! I used to have a snack at around 3 pm, when I was watching a Georgian series. Today at 2:15 pm I was already hungry and had to drink some water so I could make it to 3 pm and not eat too soon after lunch, which is the main meal in Brazil. 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 359 of 415 13 November 2014 at 11:30pm | IP Logged |
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Intermediate Chinese - complex grammar. Not difficult, but since the chapters are long they go in depth into the themes. Today was about subject and topic. I read t all but I was a bit lost halfway. It was enough for me to have an idea of how grammatical sentences work. I do have a background, an elementary feeling for what is correct, and I expect it to get improved through exposure. The fact my grammar got better can be shown by my improvement on understanding the novel i'm reading by using Pera-pera only and not translation - that is, I get the words but I need grammar to decode the sentence, and I'm doing this much better than a couple of months ago.
Georgian reading. Three days with intensive reading of short articles and I can feel the difference. I'm understanding more and more from Jules Verne's books too. I'm eager to read more from his books, they have plenty of dialogues and are interesting. 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 360 of 415 17 November 2014 at 8:55pm | IP Logged |
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Warning: a long post follows ;-)
Last weekend brought up a lot of reflexions, triggled by the raise of the dollar and the threatening to my upcoming trip to Europe next year. I am still trying my best to go, even if the ticket prices keep raising, but arguments got me thinking: what's the point in devoting so much energy and time to a hobby when the only practice I get is to able to travel once a year and order a bottle of mineral water in the target language? Because I don't think I'd manage to get more than that in Italy or Germany, just like I didn't go beyond restaurant-talk in France or in the ABC Islands. Right, I could meet good friends in Germany but given the short amount of time we'd meet, it would not be fair to go for shaky German practice instead of having deeper conversations in English, that would reinforce friendship. So, I'm still at this dilemma of spending most of my day studying languages, waiting years to see some result and not using that knowledge for practical reasons - be they professional, economical, cultural, artistical, self-realizational. I keep thinking of ways to make use of this hobby more productively, and I'm not necessarily speaking of monetizing it. Either through writing a blog and promoting it, or writing a book on learning languages, or a textbook on a less-commonly learned language I study, or trying to figure out ways to get Brazilians to learn languages more effectively. I even have time for that (would have to maintain a narrower schedule, of course). That is typical of me: I have lots of ideas and I'm good at performing ideas from others, with dilligence and discipline. But I'm not good at converting my own ideas into concrete products. I'm a guy of processes not projects. So I keep doing things in the autopilot, that is, things I learned to do in a way that can adapt to my routine. I live healthily thanks to that and I'm getting to read stuff that is constantly changing the way I see things, but I'm not giving back. It's about giving back, once again. I'm only accumulating information and I don't think it will spread on its own after a critical point or I will receive a job offer or will reach the newspapers again and this time being invited to write articles constantly or whatever. Whatever profit or goal or concrete deed I want to take place after my studies must be started by me alone. But then it's easy to just stick to the routine and hope in a couple of years I'll be understanding Georgian or Mandarin fluently. Digressions apart, I have some down to earth remarks on my studies. I finished Russianpod101. Now I'm going to try news items or other sorts of short texts. It was working fine for Russian, it is working for Georgian. Ideally, I'd get the Russian and English versions of a world newspaper. I'm already reading Divergent but 3 pages a day is too little for the SC. That is, now I have the same issue with Georgian and Jules Verne's book. The reading got much better since a few days ago in the sense that I'm understanding more and more, and associating it with translation easily. The mere fact I can flip through L2 and L1 texts more easily demonstrates my reading skills for L2 have improved. This is something critical that can't be neglected. It is always critical to be reading a page, to gaze over and to resume later, because you get lost, even in L1. But in L1 or in a proficient L2 you can easily flip through the previous sentences and get into the story again. You do so in a fraction of seconds, sometimes even unnoticedly, and this is something you don't have for a weak L2, becaue even re-reading what you just read will still prove hard and sometimes with almost the same level of transparency - happened so often with Chinese. Anyway, I'm enjoying reading all 3 more and more, and I need to be exposed to more texts in them as well as improve my SC score. Will see how things will come along now that I'm finishing my schedule earlier. Today, for the record, I won't have time because I'm writing this long post. Again with SC stats: I'm doing most of my languages 10 minutes a day; Serpent will say it's too little and I stop before actually delve into it, but it's about the most I can take especially when there are no L1 subs and I don't understand L2 well enough to actually enjoy the story yet. Now, some math: 50 films of 90 minutes each will make 4500 minutes for a half challenge (which is what I'm aiming for for Norwegian, Georgian, German, Russaian and Chinese). At a conservative projection, I'll be studying 200 days of full schedule before the end of the SC (in fact, I have over 120 so far). That means I need 22:30 minutes each day by language I want to accomplish a half challenge for. It is ok with Chinese by far and almost accomplished with Russian, but the big issue is with Norwegian, German and Georgian. French is even worse - I aimed for a full challenge on it. On the other hand, this is the sort of issue I can deal with more easily on weekends. Watching a film is enough to catch up, and there are several days when I watch more than 10 minutes because I'm at the end of an episode. Finishing the video part isn't my main issue anyway. The most important thing is that I'm keeping consistency in all of my SC languages. I'll be fine if I finish either the reading or the film part for each of them, which is still ambitious given that I'm only doing 3 pages a day for Russian/Georgian and 4 for Chinese now. Georgian is the most critical of all of them because I'm at low scores in both reading and film. What needs to happen is that I reach basic reading fluency in Georgian and Russian somewhere next year in a way that I would increase my reading to over 10 pages a day and finish at least the reading part for Georgian, for example. I don't see this happen in the next few months, but if it happens through the end of the SC then my goals will have been reached and stats are what will mean less by that time. Finished Grammaire Progressive du Français niveau avancé. This book didn't teach me only French - it gave me an important lesson about the right timing for using a language resource. It dealt with my main difficulties in French - subjonctif, verbal complements etc. in a systematic way. The most important - I was at the right level to use it, since I already understand French and have a solid background on its usage. So, whenever I read a rule, I could associate it with what I knew and think "Oh, that indeed sounds more natural, because that's what I 'm used to hearing more often". It is not the same when you are starting in a language and read a lot of grammar rules that seem dettached from your reality. Therefore, I used this book at the exact time - not too soon that I wouldn't be able to retain most of it, and not too late that I would find it repetitive. After all, that would be the case if I had read the previous levels. I don't think I'd learn much from them. I have made this mistake so many times of 'wasting' a book that was still beyond my level when I could have waited so I could take the most out of it, and luckily in 2014 I learned how to assess it better. For example, I'm using my Estonian textbooks more wisely and I saved 'Learn Norwegian' for a review+consolidation on minor grammar aspects, just like I did with Grammaire Progressive du Français. Does it mean my French is now flawless and I learned all the verbal regency rules? Far from that. But at least now I have repertoire, background, that is, I'm familiar with what is right and whenever I write something wrong I will at least have the feeling that something isn't adequate. Now I'm using Chineseskill regularly. Not using Anki or Memrise anymore. I like Chineseskills because it covers vocabulary on concrete things, and it also includes input with characters and typing out sentences in Pinyin/characters. Edited by Expugnator on 17 November 2014 at 8:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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