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Evita’s Mix of Languages

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Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6312 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 137 of 236
25 August 2014 at 3:24pm | IP Logged 
I think my half-vacation from studying has ended, I worked on my grammar books during the weekend and I also added about 15 sentences to my grammar deck. I also read some more through the You're Beautiful transcript.

Speaking of dramas, Marriage, Not Dating just finished. It was a great rom-com IMO. I'm also watching It's Okay, It's Love and it is interesting and very unusual. The main characters are a female psychiatrist and a male writer. She has intimacy issues (because as a child she witnessed her mother being unfaithful) and he has an even more severe childhood trauma (his father used to beat him and his brother spent many years in jail for killing the father) and he sleeps in a bathtub, not on a bed. He also has hallucinations. It all sounds very serious but actually it's a romantic comedy. The heroine lives with two housemates in a house he owns and he decides to move in with them while his place is being renovated. What I really like is that everything is handled in an adult way, there are no stupid misunderstandings that could be solved with one conversation and no petty revenges. But this drama may not be for everyone, it has a very distinctive feel to it.

Anyway, I've realized that it's better for my studying to watch ongoing dramas, not old ones, because when an old drama grabs me I just keep watching it when I should be studying. With new dramas, it's only two episodes per week.

I've only 5 Deutsche Welle lessons left and I plan to finish them this week. My German classes will also end soon. Then I'll have to find something new to do to keep improving.
1 person has voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6312 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 138 of 236
01 September 2014 at 12:01pm | IP Logged 
I finished Warum Nicht but it's not much to be happy about, it was pretty easy. I was happy though that the story had a happy ending.

I have bookmarked http://www.sueddeutsche.de on my work computer and I sometimes open it to read something. It requires some effort though to really concentrate and to look up the unknown words so I don't do it too often.

My favorite Korean song at the moment is this one, it's from the OST of It's Okay, It's Love. It's been stuck in my head for many days.

I don't think I've mentioned this before but I actually have two sentence decks for Korean. One is the grammar deck that I've talked about many times, and the other one is, or will be, more focused on vocabulary and various expressions. I haven't published this other deck yet because it barely has 100 sentences at the moment but whenever I encounter a sentence that seems good but doesn't belong in my grammar deck (for whatever reason, usually because the grammar has already been covered by many other sentences), I add it to this other deck. TTMIK levels 8 and 9 have many lessons introducing various expressions and I'm going to be adding them to the other deck, not to the grammar deck. I think it's nice to separate things like that.

I finally finished going through Click Korean last week, I only had the last lesson left. I mean I didn't study it (it was too easy), I just extracted audio for my sentences. Now I have one less sentence source. But it's fine. The Russian grammar books have exactly the kinds of sentences I need, and audio as well, so I'm going to continue with that.

Creating the deck is a lot of work though. Last week I wanted to add some sentences with 아니라 but TTMIK doesn't have any and neither does the Russian book so I had to google it and add some sentences without audio. Oh well.

By the way, I had to create a different profile in Anki in order to study this deck. I can't study it in the profile that is synchronized with AnkiWeb because sometimes I want to insert new cards in the middle of the deck and I need all the cards to be new in order for it to work. That's a limitation of Anki.

So last week I did all of chapter 8 of my Russian textbook and started chapter 9. I am not only reading the dialogues and the grammar parts but I'm also doing all the exercises (orally). That's what takes up most of the time. Each chapter has many exercises and each exercise contains 5-10 sentences that you have to modify according to a certain pattern. I don't write them (that would take forever) but I think about the answers and say them aloud and it's useful practice for me.

Edited by Evita on 01 September 2014 at 12:07pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6312 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 139 of 236
07 September 2014 at 1:14pm | IP Logged 
Yesterday I looked through about 5-6 Korean textbooks to see what grammar points they introduce and in what order. Mostly I concentrated on the intermediate grammar that I haven't learned (well) yet. Based on my findings, I decided where they should be in my grammar deck and wrote it down. Here's a screenshot if you're curious:



The green ones are already in the deck, the black ones not yet. Levels 6-8 were practically empty before yesterday so you can see how many grammar constructions I looked at. By the end of the day my head was so full of it all that I couldn't take it anymore and had to stop. Anyway, it's good that I have planned it out for a while again, I like having a system.

Then I quite accidentally found podbay.fm. I searched for "KBS" and found a whole slew of Korean podcasts including Yoo Inna's podcast. It's nice to have a site with an English interface.

On Thursday and Friday I had some time at work and I read all of Iyagi 31 intensively. Then I started to read it again, this time looking at the translation as well, but I didn't finish it yet. I already know most of the grammar and vocabulary they use in the Iyagi lessons so for the most part I can understand them without a dictionary. I do have to think longer if I encounter a long sentence with like ten grammar constructions connected to each other. There are the cases where the translation is the most useful.

There was this phrase in the lesson: 공부하다 보면 좋을 거예요. I had to look up '-다 보면' and I found this wonderful compilation of 'The verb 보다 as an auxiliary'. Nice.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I've decided not to use 'Elementary Korean' or 'Continuing Korean' for now. I went through both of them yesterday and I realized that they are too theoretical (or too linguistic) for what I need now. My goal in Korean is complete fluency and I've recently started to think that I'd like to teach Korean sometime in the future as well so I'll definitely be coming back to these books when I am more proficient in the language. But for now I'll keep going with the Russian textbook and Ewha.

Edited by Evita on 07 September 2014 at 1:18pm

2 persons have voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6312 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 140 of 236
10 September 2014 at 11:04am | IP Logged 
Yesterday was my last German lesson. I'm kind of sad because I liked the teacher. I told her about Slow German and she liked the site a lot, she even used a couple of its texts in our lessons. I also told her about Anki and at first she was kind of overwhelmed by it all but then yesterday we talked about it again and I showed her the cloze deletion cards and explained how they can be used for grammar study and she liked it a lot. Of course, you have to understand all the concepts in Anki before you can start creating cards, and it's not always easy, but I think I may have convinced her that Anki is worth the effort. Since she's a language teacher she would have lots of opportunities to create various decks for her students.

So what's next for my German? Two things for now - add the Latvian translations to my word list (about 2000 words in total and 15% translations added) and finish the grammar book. I think I'm still stuck somewhere in chapter 7.
1 person has voted this message useful



Stassri
Newbie
Korea, South
Joined 3858 days ago

23 posts - 29 votes
Speaks: Korean*

 
 Message 141 of 236
11 September 2014 at 11:49am | IP Logged 
Evita wrote:
There was this phrase in the lesson: 공부하다 보면 좋을 거예요. I had to look up '-다 보면' and I found this wonderful compilation of 'The verb 보다 as an auxiliary'. Nice.


I had trouble figuring out what that sentence could possibly mean. So I read their script, and... I don't know, "~다 보면 (root of adjective)을 거예요" is not something that sounds always right. Actually, I guess it would sound wrong more often than not.
Oh, never mind. You'll eventually get used to it with enough exposure.
1 person has voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6312 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 142 of 236
11 September 2014 at 2:18pm | IP Logged 
Stassri wrote:
I had trouble figuring out what that sentence could possibly mean. So I read their script, and... I don't know, "~다 보면 (root of adjective)을 거예요" is not something that sounds always right. Actually, I guess it would sound wrong more often than not.
Oh, never mind. You'll eventually get used to it with enough exposure.


네, 그럴 것 같아요. 많이 들어야 되는데 익숙하게 될 거예요. It's my favorite way of learning. A bit later in the same transcript, there's the phrase '나이를 먹어서 그런지'. When I first read it I had never heard of '-서 그런지' so I just ignored it. Now I read it again and I recognized the construction and suddenly I understood everything. I love it when that happens. Oh and "eating your age" means getting older? LOL.
1 person has voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6312 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 143 of 236
17 September 2014 at 3:59pm | IP Logged 
I'm doing more or less the same as always. I finished studying Iyagi #31 and started #32 (about airports). I also started watching A Gentleman's Dignity, for which I also have the transcript. I had free time at work today so I read about one page of the transcript while also checking the translation in the subtitles. I added about 20 new words to my Anki, and I had to do it via my phone because the internet connection on my work computer changed recently and now Anki is not able to synchronize at all so I can't use it.

Speaking of Anki, the daily reviews are getting a bit much again but I'm still coping and adding 5 new words on most days. I want to keep the number of reviews as low as I can so I don't press the 'Again' button the first three times I see a card even if I have forgotten it. I just learn it again and press 'Good'.

I've also been reviewing the TTMIK lessons, mostly level 7 lately. I love the KORLINK application because it allows me to easily pick the lesson I want based on the description. Sure, I have all the lessons downloaded but the file names don't include the topic of the lesson.

I am still listening to podcasts as always. Yoo Inna has a new drama now (I checked it out but it seemed rather boring) so she's not available to do the show every night so often she has guest DJs. On September 3rd it was Daniel Choi. It was very strange listening to a male voice.
1 person has voted this message useful



Evita
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Latvia
learnlatvian.info
Joined 6312 days ago

734 posts - 1036 votes 
Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian
Studies: Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 144 of 236
19 September 2014 at 9:47am | IP Logged 
Yesterday I added the word 딴 (other) to Anki. Can you believe I had never seen it before? I'd probably heard it dozens of times but never singled it out. It makes me wonder what other basic words I don't know yet.

I've been sticking to my resolution to try to read more. I tried an internet article about the actress 공효진 but I didn't work my way through it because it was too difficult. I decided to stick to texts with translations for now. If I can finish at least 5 episodes of AGD by the end of the year I'll call it a win.


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