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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 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 49 of 415 14 January 2014 at 11:32pm | IP Logged |
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I really don't know how I found it (this and panglosskool). It was one of these moments
you get lost in searching the internet for resources as a way of procrstinating (fortunately since 2012 I decided to do less collecting and more learning and I'm happy about that). 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 50 of 415 14 January 2014 at 11:54pm | IP Logged |
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Just came across another film with subtitles in English:
Svan Chemi tsolis dakalebi will have to wait (or not). This one has both Russian and Georgian so far. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 51 of 415 15 January 2014 at 9:20pm | IP Logged |
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Important lessons learned today:
a) I should pay attention to the speech while watching Himmelblå. The way it is now, I'm basically seeing the scene and reading the subtitles, I'm not benefiting much of the listening. b) Doing 3 Chinese activities in a row can be unnecessarily boring. It's better to alternate the cartoon with the French film, then do the fable L-Ring then Travel in Chinese, or even insert something else in between. I was leaving all of the 3 Chinese activities for the last and so I went on thinking "Oh no, I still have to do 3 Chinese". By doing this, I unnecessarily added pressure and uncomfort to my Chinese learning which otherwise could remain as pleasant as the others. For example, the fable from Everyday Chinese: Fables and Anedoctes has turned out to be quite interesting and easy to follow. Understanding the dialogues at Travel in Chinese isn't troublesome either, and sometimes I get XiYangYang comprehension above average. c) When the content really matters, language does stay a little behind. So is the case with the film 99 Francs I'm watching now, with subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese so that I don't miss anything. A retrocess? Not really. I could turn off subtitles and follow the story likewise, but in this case I don't really feel like missing ANYthing, so I read the subtitles in Portuguese and when it is a wordplay or a joke there is enough time for me to catch it from the original audio, too. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 52 of 415 18 January 2014 at 12:18am | IP Logged |
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The day went better than expected. I woke up at 3 am to renew some documents, got home
at 10 am, started studying, had lunch, studied a bit more and recovered from sleeping deprivation by taking a nap from 2 to 4 pm. There was still time for me to finish the whole schedule after that. After two weeks of TAC 2014, I think it's time for a more detailed update. Overall, it is going smoother than ever, thanks to my overall improvement in all languages. Last year I was still an A1-lowA2 in 3 languages at once (Chinese, Russian and Georgian), had to rely heavily on textbook studying and therefore the study routine was much more consuming. Nowadays I'm finally shifting to a more friendly set of activities, including reading with much less effort and much more pleasure as well as starting to understand what I write. Chinese -> Podcast is so well-suited to my routine that I couldn't do without it any longer. I admit I sometimes don't pay attention to the explanations, but I at least read the pdf and I do learn new words from it. Not to mention the cultural notes, they have been invaluable for whichever language. I get more connected to the country and the language. I know that reading about the culture without knowing the language would be like spoiling and thus demotivating, but getting small chunks of cultural notes is the right balance; I keep myself motivated. Nowadays I feel much more empathy for the Chinese culture than at my 'rantest' period, which was by the end of 2012. I like to have a focus on contemporary culture, not on ancient or XIX or eaerly XX culture. Thus, I get contemporary info from the podcast and from Travel in Chinese, while I enrich my knowledge on the Chinese traditions with the book Everyday Chinese Fables and Anedoctes, which is like a light trial of what I'm sure is a much deeper corpus. Now I can imagine myself going to China and reading signs, as well as reading the classics with translation. I feel like I can do it. I'm having a good comprehension of XiYangYang's episodes, too. Memrise is addictive. Any neatly designed and consistently interactive language-learning app can be addictive (and this excludes Anki, in my opinion). Russian -> I finished Living Language Ultimate Russian yesterday, and I can't recommend it well enough, as I already said. It helped that I went through other textbooks first, so the long lessons didn't lead me to burnout. Yet I'm once gaain amazed with the consistence of the lessons (I've used French LL Beginner then advanced too, but at a time at which my level was far beyond any textbooks) and I even changed my mind about one issue: so far I foresaw studying languages which had an Assimil book, which would make my life easier. Now a LL might count higher than an Assimil. If there are both (and this is usually the case), even better. So, with an Assimil and a LL I know I can really learn a language and not get lost in a storm of phrasebookish sentences as is the case with Colloquial and TY). I finished LL yday, that is to say, I started a new book today (now my syntax sounded almost Chinese). That was the old TY Russian. I'm happy that the first lesson was so short that I didn't even notice it was over, and so are the other first ones. I think I can do it, including version exercises, without being overwhelmed and while keeping an eye at the clock. Pity that now I'm almost audioless. May have to find a Memrise sentences course. No Russian anymore at my Svani film in Georgian, now that the Russian character died (oh no, a spoiler!!). Georgian -> Speaking of version exercises, I couldn't postpone them anymore for Georgian and so I'm doing them for Basic Georgian. A nice decision. It's not the same when you look at an exercise and think (I'll skip it, think I know it) and when you actually get down to doing it. I'm starting to automatize some structures that are translated idiomatically, no literally, into Georgian from English and I know that will help me enormously in the near future. As for reading, it couldn't be better. I dare say I can read the fairy tale book without a dictionary and follow the story. Even the older texts at A Georgian Reader seem less tiresome, though I still have the feeling they are teaching me unnecessary vocabulary. I have a strong feeling that this year I'll be able to read Georgian comfortably with a dictionary. Norwegian -> Which is ehat I attained with Norwegian, now I know it. My reading speed and knowledge of the vocabulary improved at Beatles to the extent that there are fewer words and I can spot them in advance and look them up before the audio reaches that portion, at least half of the times. I started to pay more attention to the L/R aspect of Himmelblå too, but not always. Have to keep reminding myself of that. French -> Not much to say, I just feel the reading speed is improving, maybe it is already higher than in English. One achievement I made in French is the ability to recognize which words are essential to look up, and which are not. It may sound obvious, but it is not. I still get lost at this respect in Norwegian and Georgian. it may be even easier in Georgian than in Norwegian due to the cases, you know that an instrumental and an adverbial aren't the main thing to be understood in a sentence. In a less conservative bokmål, though, as the one from Beatles, we have the ending -a which could be a definite feminine, a definite plural neuter, a past form, and I have to work out the role in the sentence as I look the word up, or as a way to know if it is worth looking the word up. Back to French: well, about to finish tome I of Le chant des sorcières, but there are still two tomes left before I can foresee going back to a story that takes place at the contemporary world. German -> Two days to get rid of GWT. Not much done except for Duolingo, which is doing well for my active skills. Papiamento -> No active skills being practicted for a long while. Reading is ok. I start to develop the ability to actually follow the story while doing background listening, something I just acknowledged with English and this allows me to say that this is a skill which is worth training, too. So, if you think you can understand well a language, start playing a video and just listening to it while browsing other tabs, to see how much you can understand in a background context, which is how you often watch TV and listen to the radio in your native language. You can often spot a significant information and tune in your ears when you're listening to your native language, and this ability can be trained in your target languages, too. BAD FACT OF THE DAY: YT started inserting ads DURING a video broadcast. More annoyance, more time, ads I won't pay any attention to anyway. I still wonder why digital marketing can be so intrusive and predatory and if the media owners do sell those ads to their customer companies as effective, and if those companies' marketing directors do believe such ads can sell. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4041 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 53 of 415 18 January 2014 at 12:50am | IP Logged |
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I'm probably already using too many Russian courses (if such a thing is possible), but now you've made me really curious about Living Language, as I've never used one of their courses before, and I'm always paranoid that everyone else is using some super awesome courses that I don't know about.
Out of curiosity, what do you prefer about it over Assimil? Is there more overall content, or is it more a matter of how the course is formatted? Edited by YnEoS on 18 January 2014 at 12:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 54 of 415 18 January 2014 at 1:05am | IP Logged |
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I think both. I've tried all of the 3 Assimil Russian courses I could find, and none of
them moves at the right pace. They all flood the learning with vocabulary. The newest ones start softer but after some lessons you get the same overload of vocabulary again. And they are terrible with grammar, which Living Language does so well. So, the underlying chaos of Assimil which works for Romance languages didn't work so well for Russian, also because the texts aren't consistenly graded. They don't explain grammar enough and they try to chunk up vocabulary also through notes, that is, they introduce a new word and in the notes they show everything about its cases then the adverbs and verbs formed from it. All this being done all the time, removes the focus from the main content. While at LL everything is so neat and organized. The dialogues are also meaningful. You get 40 lessons which theoretically is much less than the 70 or 100 ones from Assimil, but in practice the overall content is much more relevant. Not to mention the good cultural notes and exercises at LL. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4041 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 55 of 415 18 January 2014 at 1:30am | IP Logged |
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Ah I see, yes I've had that problem with the Russian and Hungarian Assimil courses, and so far my response has always been to supplement my Assimil studies with a course based around grammar drills.
I'll definitely take a look into LL Ultimate Russian though. Edited by YnEoS on 18 January 2014 at 1:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 56 of 415 18 January 2014 at 5:11pm | IP Logged |
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A Saturday that was useful for studying again. I can actually only do this because I'm on holidays chez mes parents. I
didn't got much sleep and woke at 6 am, started studying at 7 and now at half past noon I'm done. I dilligently translated the 20 short paragraphs/sentences into Georgian, from Basic Georgian. It's really worth the trouble, I'm starting to feel at ease with the way some sentences are put up, actively, I mean. Reading is also somewhat easier. I've watched more from the film Svani and I've started doing like Norwegian: I notice that the English subtitle is too abridged but I start to recognize the missing words. Even the old-fashioned or sometimes too literary language from A Georgian Reader's texts start to seem more accessible. The Chinese resources I'm using seem easier each day. I can predict the fables at Everyday Chinese. I follow XiYangYang's episodes sometimes with 80% understanding (it has subtitles), and the dialogues from Travel in Chinese just leave the core words from each lesson to be understood, that is, I don't have to worry about other higher-frequency words and I can focus on the words that are actually being introduced at that lesson. This had been a main concern at other textbooks, since, for example, a given lesson would present me everything about buying shoes but I still had most of the characters and words in each sentence to understand, so, there was little RAM memory to focus on learning the shoes-purchasing involved vocabulary. I'm starting to notice some similarity between the number of books/pages read and the level achieved in Norwegian and French, even though my Norwegian is still not a consolidated B1. I'm reading my 5th Norwegian book, and the number of words I look up is more or less the same I did when in French when I was reading my 5th French book. I've read 20 French books now and I believe I'm at a consistent B2 level in spite of mistakes, so that means that by the time I'll be reading my 20th Norwegian book, I might have achieved that basic fluency I'm aiming for. This is regardless of similarities between French and Portuguese, because when I started French I had to look up dozens of words per page and now I don't need it for Norwegian anymore. So, at one point I've made use of that vocabulary discount in French and started learning important non- cognate words that eventually brought me to fluency. Now I overcome this lack of vocabulary discount in Norwegian by just learning the Norwegian roots, and now I'm going to the final third of Norwegian words that once done will lead me to the same or a similar level, and then I will resort to learning fewer and fewer words which are also less frequent, just like I'm doing now in French. I believe I can repeat this even for Georgian. I'm just at my 2nd book in Georgian and I have no reason not to believe that by my 5th book I'll be at a consistent B1. So, the idea behind the Super Challenge does work, it is a consistent way to bring the textbook vocabulary you've learned in the previous stages to an upper level and to fill in with important words that actually happen in a native text. No wonder this parallel/billingual reading works, it is the same principle behind Assimil, it's just that we're going further and with longer texts with no grammar notes (one reason why studying consistently grammar at A2 stage helps making sense out of the stage). So, when you continued reading 200, 300-page novels with a translation it is as if you've had continued Assimil on your own, and that is why it works for me, since Assimil does work for bringing me up to A2. I just have to keep in mind that I'll need that grammar I've had studied elsewhere. I paid more attention to today's Papiamento video. It was an interesting subject, an announcement from the Minister of the Antilles. She says that she does listen to the people of Curaçao and they want to remain in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, that was a bit like this, I think the overall tone was quite friendly. As for my reading skills, I'm at a stage at which I barely have to look up some 5 Dutch words per couple of pages, while being surprised by finding expressions I assumed to be regional of Brazilian Portuguese and are quite the same, for example 'muskitero' that you use to protect your bed from mosquitoes, it sounds as if I was saying it here in Brazil, and it is actually pronounced exactly the same despite the spelling in Portuguese being 'mosquiteiro' -> they do reduce this final 'o' to 'u' while we reduce our initial 'o' to 'u' too, just like their spelling, and we also reduce the diphtong 'ei' to closed 'e' in this case. I really enjoy the book I'm reading, 'E otro kara di solo', even though it is a translation from Dutch. I feel like I'm back at Curaçao and I've learned so much useful vocabulary. It's like reading a book from the Coleção Vagalume, just that it seems longer and more complete, also from a political and geographical point of view. It brings up important insights on the life and culture of Curaçao despite being a teenager's novel. You get to learn a lot between the lines, while a teenager, for example, would just be thrilled by the main plot. I opened one more lesson in TY Russian and noticed the format with translation exercises. I felt so, how can I put this, relieved. It reminded me of how I learned French and I thought to myself "this does work and this will teach me Russian". So, now I'm working at activating Russian and Georgian in a consistent way by doing WRITTEN translation exercises. This worked for French and German and I'm sure it will work for these too. Simply put, if you need to learn to make sentences in the target language, do it; wanna get used to the sounds? listen to it on and on. No deviations. I didn't do enough version exercises in Norwegian and maybe at this stage my active Norwegian could have been better, even though I might have already overcome this with so much series watching. In the case of Georgian, I have no choice, due to the lack of subtitles. OTOH, I do need to resume doing this for Chinese. I did it mostly with Assimil and Méthode 90, like I did before, but now I can't recall another similar textbook with such exercises. There is this feeling that if I can get through Mandarin, Georgian and Russian, I can learn other languages and that will be actually easier. I no longer feel I'm wasting my time. It's been 2, 2 1/2 years of despair, anxiety but now I see a bigger picture and I'm glad I didn't give up when I felt like doing so. It was important that I went straight to the ones I realy wanted to learn. I didn't do like before 'Oh, gonna learn Indonesian now because Mandarin is too hard for me'. I think that I've done the hardest work first and whatever comes now will be done with joy and comfort, also because I've learned to overcome many of my learning (and procastinating) mistakes. TAC 14 started hopefully and meaningfully! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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