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Josquin’s TAC 2014 - Катюша, Celts, 旅立ち

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
227 messages over 29 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 20 ... 28 29 Next >>
liammcg
Senior Member
Ireland
Joined 4364 days ago

269 posts - 397 votes 
Speaks: English*

 
 Message 153 of 227
29 June 2014 at 5:05pm | IP Logged 
Hey, Josquin! If you need any help with Irish let me know, I'll exchange it for some German practice!;) Also,
I'm waiting on delivery of Assimil Italian!
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Josquin
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4604 days ago

2266 posts - 3992 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish
Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian

 
 Message 154 of 227
29 June 2014 at 6:28pm | IP Logged 
Thanks, liammcg! I'm not really having any problems with Irish, only with the resources... ;) Exchanging German for some Irish practice sounds like a good offer though. In bocca al lupo with your Italian!

I wanted to see what I can still do in Italian and this has been the result. I definitely need to brush up the subjunctive (among other things)...

Italiano

Buona sera, amici!

Come vedete, ho deciso di imparare Italiano di nuovo. Penso che non abbia studiato Italiano in dieci anni, ma non sono certo. Ho bisogno di ripetere la grammatica, il vocabolario eccetera. Voglio migliorare il mio livello affinché possa parlare cogli Italiani di nuovo. Sono stato in Italia due volte, ma era più di dieci anni fa. Quando tornerò in Italia, voglio essere capace di usare il mio Italiano e parlare colla gente. Allora, mi bisogna leggere, ascoltare e scrivere. Spero che il mio livello si migliori presto.

Ciao e a presto!


EDIT: Corrections are more than welcome, for my Portuguese text (see above) as well! By the way, I can't write "italiano" with a lowercase i, the forum software automatically converts it into a capital I.

Edited by Josquin on 29 June 2014 at 8:28pm

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Josquin
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4604 days ago

2266 posts - 3992 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish
Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian

 
 Message 155 of 227
06 July 2014 at 1:50pm | IP Logged 
SUNDAY, 06 JULY 2014

Okay, nobody corrected my Italian and Portuguese texts. That either means I made no mistakes or no native speaker read my posts. Let's go for the first explanation! ;)

Well, as usual, I didn't get to study too much last week. I was very busy and had some urgent problems to solve, so I couldn't even think about languages for a few days. However, I managed to do a little bit of studying today.

Português

As I already said, I absolutely love Portuguese. Studying it is a lot of fun and I really enjoy it. I finished unit 3 in Portugiesisch mit System today and worked through the dialogue and grammar of unit 4.

The main topic of the first units is verb conjugation in the present tense. There seem to exist quite a few irregular verbs though. By now, I've encountered ser, estar, ter, querer, ir, divertir-se, vestir-se, ler, dormir, and ouvir. I guess there are still more to come.

Italiano

Doing Italian in parallel with Portuguese hasn't worked out too well by now. I should probably concentrate on Portuguese for the time being and decide whether to go on with Italian or Portuguese after finishing Portugiesisch mit System.

日本語

And I'm back with Japanese! It seems to be like g-bod said: You simply can't give up on this language! I repeated unit 17 in Genki and worked through the dialogue and grammar of unit 18, which deals with transitive/intransitive verb pairs, しまう, ながら, the conjunctive particle と, and the ば-form of verbs. While the focus of the last few units has been on casual language, the next few units will be all about honorific and humble language (敬語).

It's fascinating to compare learning a Romance language to learning an East Asian language. You simply need so much more effort to get to the same level of comprehension in Japanese than you need in Portuguese. I could never have imagined just how different Japanese is from European languages, before I started studying it. And, on top of that, there's still kanji...
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Josquin
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4604 days ago

2266 posts - 3992 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish
Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian

 
 Message 156 of 227
19 July 2014 at 5:59pm | IP Logged 
SATURDAY, 19 JULY 2014

This will be a rather short update as there isn't much to report, but I thought I'd write an entry anyway. I'm now pretty busy with my thesis and singing, so language learning isn't that important right now. On top of that, there was all the euphoria connected with Germany winning the World Cup, so my study habits went totally overboard.

As I don't have much to report anyway, maybe I'll use this post for a little more general remarks. I now feel that the intense language studies of the past one and a half years when I was studying up to five languages simultaneously were rather a compensation for dealing with my problems. I'm in a much better place now than I used to be for a long time and I feel that the obsession with languages has disappeared and made way for other interests and having a life in general.

This is not to say I'll stop learning languages (I've made the mistake to proclaim this more than once, not gonna do it again), but I'm no longer obsessed with languages and studying for studying's sake. For the near future, I'm going to focus on Portuguese and maybe read or watch something in Russian now and then. As far as Japanese and Irish are concerned, I'll probably keep doing something in them from time to time, but only irregularly.

Português

I'm now working on unit 5 in Portugiesisch mit System. Although there are of course many similarities with other Romance languages, I'm still surprised that Portuguese is quite a bit different from Italian, Spanish, and French. I thought there would be more similarities, but pronunciation and vocabulary (but also some grammar points) are rather distinct from the Romance languages I already know.

Anyway, I like the soft, melodic sound of Portuguese and the many nasal vowels, which make it sound very different from Italian or Spanish. Unit 5 deals with possessive pronouns, the near future with "ir fazer", comparation of adjectives, and some irregular verbs.

Edited by Josquin on 19 July 2014 at 6:01pm

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kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
Joined 4607 days ago

1031 posts - 1571 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 157 of 227
22 July 2014 at 7:53am | IP Logged 
Glad to see you are back. And congrats to your nation for winning the World Cup!
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Josquin
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 4604 days ago

2266 posts - 3992 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish
Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian

 
 Message 158 of 227
22 July 2014 at 9:23pm | IP Logged 
TUESDAY, 22 JULY 2014

Funny things happen. Just when you think you're going to settle for one language, you suddenly remember why you started learning another language in the first place - and fall back in love with it.

This is what happened to me after writing my last entry in this log. I thought I'd concentrate on Portuguese, because it's a pleasant, uncomplicated language and I have good materials for it. But then I was reminded just how much I love Ireland, Irish culture, and the Irish language.

A friend of mine is turning 30 this year (just as me), and his girlfriend asked me and his other friends to write a recommendation for our favourite travel destination. She is going to collect them, have them bound, and give the collection to my friend as a birthday present, so he has a lot of great recommendations for spending his vacations.

I didn't hesitate a moment and chose Ireland. While I was writing the recommendation, I remembered the great time I had in Ireland last year and how much I fell in love with this country. In fact, I had been planning on going there again this year, but unfortunately that fell through due to lack of money.

Be that as it may, I had a look at my photos from last year and at the books about Ireland that I had bought in Dublin and suddenly all the motivation for learning Irish was there again. In fact, I realized that it had only diminished in the first place, because I couldn't find any resources that suited my way of studying. So, I decided to get serious about Irish again!

Gaeilge

I finally gave Teach Yourself Irish a try and worked through the first four units. They were very easy for me, because I already have a basic foundation in Irish, but I dare say this might be the introduction into the language that I have been looking for. I plan on working through the book and then getting back to my other resources, i.e. Learning Irish, Gaeilge gan Stró, and maybe Living Language.

I feel that Teach Yourself has a healthy equilibrium between dialogue, vocabulary, and grammar, something I missed in the other courses, so I'll keep working with it. It's probably not as in-depth as Learning Irish and not as communicative as Gaeilge gan Stró, but I think it might be optimal for building a foundation in the language on that I can build with the other materials.

In addition, I'm reading books about Irish history and culture and I promised to myself that I would get back to Ireland next year. If I have enough money, I might even take a course at Oideas Gael, but we'll have to see about that. Anyway, I'm glad that I found my motivation again! In the words of the old Irish folksong:

Oró, sé do bheatha abhaile! Anois ar theacht an tsamhraidh.


@kujichagulia: Thanks a lot! The days after winning the cup were absolutely crazy! :)

@liammcg: Now that I'm serious about Irish again, I might come back to your offer of a language exchange sooner or later, but I'll have to do some studying before. Anyway, you'll hear from me!

Edited by Josquin on 22 July 2014 at 9:36pm

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Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5094 days ago

4143 posts - 8864 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian
Studies: Russian

 
 Message 159 of 227
22 July 2014 at 10:24pm | IP Logged 
Dear Josquin, I am happy to see that I am not the only one to give in to my wanderlust. And congratulations
on the World Cup!
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liammcg
Senior Member
Ireland
Joined 4364 days ago

269 posts - 397 votes 
Speaks: English*

 
 Message 160 of 227
23 July 2014 at 1:31pm | IP Logged 
Iontach, go n-éirí leat! I look forward to speaking with you sometime! Liam


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