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Hříbeček’s TAC 2014 - Sokoły / Соколи | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5129 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 9 of 24 02 July 2014 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I so can't be bothered to write this update even though a lot has happened since my last one. I expect this will be my last team TAC, because it's really hard to motivate myself to write regular updates and 90% of team members quit after a month or two anyway.
POLYGLOT GATHERING BERLIN So I went to it and once again had a fantastic time. I wasn't as nervous as last time and did much better in getting to know people and not being as quiet as I was last time. The main joy of these events is speaking to kindred spirits. I never have this opportunity in normal life, which is why I come here, so to speak about and in languages in person for 4 days was bliss. I used all my languages, Spanish the most often (after English unfortunately) and Czech in the most depth and for longest periods. I had about 5 or 6 conversations in Hungarian, each one for between 1-5 minutes, so nothing to brag about. I only spoke Ukrainian a few times and it was more like a Slavic conversation each time, mixing Ukrainian, Russian, Slovak, Czech and Polish with whoever I was speaking to, because of my lack of ability and confidence in the language. The biggest surprise of the whole event for me was Toki Pona. I spoke in it a lot and about it even more, it was a possible turning point in the evolution of the language as many people heard about it for the first time and many more realised that it's not just a fun language but one with more to it. Even I realised that it is possible to talk about almost anything in the language, the key is to adapt your thinking to the language, not the language to your way of thinking. There was a documentary being made about the gathering and the film makers ended up focusing on Toki Pona and even interviewed me about it (among 3 or 4 other speakers of Toki Pona). I didn't really do a good job in the interview though (I froze), so they'll probably cut my bit (30 minute interview!). I even met the creator of Toki Pona and spoke to her in Toki Pona; that was a really strange and surreal moment! I'm not going to write such a detailed account of my time in Berlin as I did after Budapest, because I'm not sure if anybody is even following this log anymore! If there is someone and they'd like to know something then go ahead and I'll enjoy answering any questions about the event. An unexpected recent development in my language learning has been 'memrise'. I've become addicted to it. It perfectly adapted to my preferred way of studying and my personality, as I love statistics, competing in a statistical kind of way and my brain seems to absorb vocabulary and phrases a lot better with this system. It's basically a really good SRS, if you haven't heard of it. The weird thing is that it's got me right back into Hungarian in a big way. So for the last 3 weeks I've been intensively studying Hungarian vocabulary and phrases and I must have added 600 or so new words to my vocabulary. So my Hungarian has improved quicker in the last few weeks than it had for the previous 2 years probably! I've also been using it for Ukrainian but there isn't so much of that so it hasn't helped nowhere near as much as for Hungarian. Due to this memrise revolution of my Hungarian skills, Hungarian words are now constantly popping into my head. Anyway I'm bored now so I'll get back to memrise! :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4149 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 10 of 24 03 July 2014 at 3:33am | IP Logged | ||
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That's really interesting to hear about Toki Pona. I never heard of it until I found this forum, so it's really interesting to hear that you got to meet the creator and speak in it. What do you think it is about Memrise that works better than other SRS systems. I tend to lose motivation to use an SRS system, but I don't want to rule it out completely, and I certainly haven't tried all of them! Vocabulary is always my weakest point and I think part of that is due to not using one of these.
Very jealous that you got to go to Berlin! Maybe at some point there will be a Polyglot Conference near my area. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5922 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 11 of 24 03 July 2014 at 6:40am | IP Logged | ||
I second this question! I've only ever used Anki in terms of SRS programs, and although it generally works great, I can never motivate myself to work on it unless I have something even more tedious to get through. I'm sorry to have missed the Polyglot Conference! Unfortunately I was traveling through Romania and Bulgaria at the time, so I wasn't able to go. I wish there had been better timing, because I'll be in Berlin in a few weeks. How did you like Berlin? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5129 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 12 of 24 03 July 2014 at 2:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, 2 replies! Congratulations on being the first people to write in my log this year, I appreciate it! :)
@Fuenf_katzen - It was so strange to meet the creator, because she is very mysterious within the Toki Pona world as she never writes on the forums (at least not for several years), even though so many people have so many questions they want answered and problems solved (a bit like the creator of HTLAL). I always thought that maybe she wasn't interested or looked down on the community or something along those lines, but having met her now, she came across as just a very shy and humble person who is proud of the language and community but just wants to be known as the original creator, not the boss and developer of the language, she just wants to be another normal Toki Ponian. @Fuenf_katzen and Ellasevia - For me, I love the statistical and points/competition side of memrise, but that's just be my personality. It makes it have more of a community feel and you can compare yourself to others and it makes me want to outwork everybody else. It's also better for me because it tests your knowledge of the word in more ways and not just the typical Anki way and this helps me remember the word better. I also like the timing system better than Anki and the fact that you can ignore words from decks that you don't want to be tested on at any time. There are some really good decks ready to use, for example in Hungarian somebody has put all/most of the vocabulary/ phrases from the Colloquial and Assimil courses into decks. You can also create your own little mnemonics on your page to help you with any especially difficult words. It's very easy to use and set up and so give it a try. As I said, I like SRS in general and love the cooked brain feeling I get from a long session and memrise is the best one I've found so far for my needs. It's not that good for Ukrainian so I guess it might depend on how popular your language is for how good the decks there are. @Ellasevia - Berlin seemed nice, from what I saw of it. I spent nearly all my time at the gathering, but got out for an hour or so on 3 occasions to try to see a bit of the city. Hopefully there'll be another one there next year and I'll see more. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5129 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 13 of 24 12 August 2014 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've had some very fun language experiences recently, but couldn't get round to writing
them until now. I recently spent 2 1/2 weeks travelling around Western Ukraine, Moldova and a couple of days in Northern Romania. The main purpose of the trip was Ukraine, but we decided to include Moldova while we were nearby and then skip through Romania too. I won't bother talking about the countries themselves, except to say that I really enjoyed my time in all of them and the people were great in all of them. If anybody wants any more details, feel free to ask. I'll just mention the languages. I spent over 6 months studying Ukrainian almost every day for at least 10-15 minutes and was pleased to find out that using the basic but quite solid Ukrainian I'd aquired was enough to get my point across in all situations and I understand enough of the replies for us to survive everywhere. There were very few people who spoke English, almost everywhere we went I was our spokesperson (there were 4 of us),which meant a very fun pressure. So I spoke a lot of Ukrainian and learned lots of new vocabulary duringmy exchanges. I didn't really get into anything deep with anybody and wouldn't have been able to anyway. The surprising thing for me was that everybody automatically spoke to us in Ukrainian and nobody acted surprised, happy, disappointed or reacted in any kind of abnormal way to me trying to speak to them in their language. I'd love to know why? They acted like English people do when foreigners are in their country, expecting every tourist to know English. Not one person even tried to speak Russian. It definitely wasn't due to my high level, all of my sentences were slow, broken and with a strong foreign accent. Most Ukrainians were polite, humble and pleasant, but usually shy. The other point of interest in this is that they had no problem with being spoken to in Russian. My wife speaks a bit of Russian and so occasionally was forced to use it and they simply replied in Ukrainian or Russian again without any emotional reaction. In Moldova I was interested to find out that everybody (that we met) speaks and understands Russian (as well as Moldovan/Roaminian of course). My wife was therefore our main speaker and I used Ukrainian with a splattering of Russian phrases that I knew or learned along the way. Again it was enough to get by and in Moldova many people automatically replied in English and many of them expressed happiness at our attempts to speak and wonder at the reason for our visit. In Transniestra, again many people were in wonder at us and you could sense their curiosity in every exchange. There we did everything in Russian. Moldovans and Transniestrans were much more outwardly friendly than the more reserved (but very nice) Ukrainians. In Romania we used English a lot because none of us could speak Romanian. We're planning to go back because we were taken aback by how friendly everybody was. Apart from these experiences, which I've very lazily skated over, I've been working intensively on Hungarian on memrise. As I said before, memrise has helped me a lot. I've now almost worked through all of the vocabulary from Colloquial Hungarian and will soon start with the Assimil vocabulary, hundreds or even thousands of new words and phrases in both. My plan for the rest of the year is to focus on Hungarian and Czech. Whoopee, managed to do an update. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6936 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 14 of 24 12 August 2014 at 5:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's great that you had fun out there. I've only been in Romania out of those places on your list, and even then I made sure to spend most of my time in Transylvania and got hosted about half of the time by Transylvanian Hungarians. Good times.
Your experience with local Ukrainians reminds me of what happens when I'm in rural Poland or Slovakia. If people are brave enough to approach me :-P they'll often initiate in Polish or Slovak. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4487 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 15 of 24 12 August 2014 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Romanians are very easy to talk to. I also only spent time in Romania out of those
countries - and also mostly in Transylvania. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5129 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 16 of 24 01 September 2014 at 9:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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After returning from Ukraine I decided not to continue with my studies of it for now. I really enjoyed speaking it a lot while there, but it's the type of language that I can only motivate myself for when I'm going to the country. I'm definitely going back in the next few years so I'll get back into it then for sure. Who knows, maybe I'll suddenly have an urge to return to it before then.
My recent focus has been on Hungarian and Czech. Hungarian always seems to have a staying power in my passions that many other languages like Polish, Mandarin, Croatian and Ukrainian don't have. It's the isolation of the language itself, the feeling of it in my mouth, the sound, the hundreds of posts I've written here in Hungarian, the taste of the food, the spas and certain memories from trips to Hungary that have fixed themselves on me and I can't leave them. Anyway, so I've worked through and repeated the whole Colloquial Hungarian on memrise and now I'm working my way through Assimil Hungarian. For the rest of the year I'm not going to put myself under any pressure with targets and will just enjoy Hungarian, Czech and hopefully Spanish. Next year I'll have some big decisions to make because I'm planning to go to Bulgaria and Macedonia in the Summer, so I want to study one of them. I also want to learn a Turkic language or two in Chung's challenge. I'd also like to study Esperanto before the next Polyglot Gathering in Berlin in May and lately I've been feeling very drawn to Guarani. That's not to mention the usual languages on my list. My brain doesn't have nearly as much capacity as a lot of people here, so something will have to give. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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