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Isarin’s Log: F/IT SC and some Japanese | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Isarin Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5429 days ago 34 posts - 41 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Japanese Studies: Czech, Mandarin, Italian | Message 1 of 9 27 April 2014 at 6:21pm | IP Logged |
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I signed up both for the 6WC in May and for the Super Challenge, so I thought I'd give writing a log another try. My time-management is far from good, but there are a lot of public holidays coming up in May and June, so I hope I can do well with the 6WC. I might have to put working on the SC off until June though :)
6WC: Italian Level: A0/A1 (I just started studying Italian a month ago). Resources: Assimil (2nd generation), basic vocabulary, basic grammar + exercises, graded readers, weekly language meet-up. My local library has 5 shelves full of learning material for Italian and another 5 shelves of Italian books, and I didn't even count the movies yet. Seriously, after studying "less studied" languages for years I always feel like a child in a candy store when I go there. I can never leave without taking additional material, even though I already have more than enough at home...(yeah.. I know. Throwing additional material at a language doesn't help. But I like having new books every week). Goals for the 6WC: Assimil: Get to lesson 60 by June 12th. Vocabulary: Know about 1500 words by the end of the challenge. Grammar: Get through my basic grammar book & do all the exercises (just to get a basic overview). Reading: Read 100 pages in Italian. Speaking: Go to my weekly languages meet-up, sit at the Italian table for 1 hour. I won't enter this into the bot as "study time" Writing: None (I plan to start after the challenge). What I've done so far (I started on April 4th). Assimil: 28 lessons (going more or less steadily at 1 lesson per day) Italianpod101.com: 35 lessons. I won't continue with Italianpod for now, too much English chatting for my taste... Vocabulary: binge-learned 1000 words (I inputted the whole "Langenscheidt Zertifikatswortschatz Italienisch A1" and sample sentences into anki this weekend). I've also studied Latin for 5 years in secondary school and I've been studying French for more than 10 years, so many Italian words aren't totally "new" to me. Grammar: Worked through 10 of the 34 chapters in my basic grammar. Reading: I've already finished my first "book" in Italian (30 pages – yeay! Tartufo.DOC, a graded reader for beginners). There are so many graded readers to choose from! I have about 500 pages of A1/A2 material just lying around. Fun: Watched some episodes of "Sandokan". I was pretty surprised that although I could not understand what was being said, the speech sounded very clear to my ears. Super Challenge: Czech (half), French (full) French: Resources: Movies: arte is showing the first season of "Real Humans – 100% humain" again, and will start broadcasting the second season later in May. That should cover the first 10 movies or so. I also try to watch "Le dessous des cartes" every week and whatever else I like from arte's online media centre. Books: I picked up a book by Guillaume Musso at the library. I also have another one by Theresa Revay lying around, I'll start with those. The good thing about books from the library is that I actually have to get started or I won't get through them before they are due. Czech: I was in Prague 2 weeks ago and got some more books and movies. I'll have to start out with easy stuff, since my Czech has gotten really rusty. Resources: Books: I have two bilingual books and a couple of children's books and YA fantasy books on my bookshelf. I don't feel up to anything more complicated yet. The first book I'll read is called "Potlesk pro Lolu". It says "pro deti od 8 let" in the back and the cover is bright pink... Movies: I might take a trip down memory lane and start with old cartoons such as Vcelka Maja, Kocour Mikes, Ferdy, Broucci... I also own 8 movies in Czech, ranging from James Bond to romantic comedies. I'm not sure what I'll do about the rest yet. I don't want to buy 10 more movies every time I'm in Prague. I might watch the first 3 seasons of HBO's "True Blood", the DVDs seem to have Czech dubbing . So. That's it for now. I'll try to update this log bi-weekly, let's see whether I can stick to it. Edited by Isarin on 23 February 2015 at 1:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Isarin Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5429 days ago 34 posts - 41 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Japanese Studies: Czech, Mandarin, Italian | Message 2 of 9 04 May 2014 at 9:11pm | IP Logged |
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So. The challenges have started, and I've already had to alter my plans. I decided to drop the half challenge for Czech and instead take up a full Super Challenge in Italian. I'll explain the 'why' further down.
First of all I need to apologize for the snowclonish title of this log. It seemed like a good enough idea last week, so I'll just leave it like this until I can come up with something else. While I'm at it, I also apologize for excessively using weird/obscure/rare words sometimes. It's just that after going through all the trouble of learning and remembering them, I can't pass up the few chances I get to actually try out their usage. The newest addition to my collection, btw, is 'pantagruelian'. Not a very versatile word, so I'd be happy if anyone could suggest a suitable context to use it in. The German version of the word is 'pantagruelisch', it's 'pantagruelien/ne' in French and 'pantagruelico/a' in Italian. So hey, I just taught you a word in four different languages, just like that. Aaand I'll stop with the babbling now. French Super Challenge: Reading: Read Guillaume Musso's 'L'appel de l'ange'. Ca. 440 pages = 8.8 books. Rather to my own surprise, I found myself enjoying this book. It was my first book by Musso so I was a little apprehensive about using it as a start for the SC in case I might dislike it. The beginning of the story is rather slow, but after some time it picks up it's pace. It was also well suited for my current level of French. I could understand the general storyline very well, there were only some parts that I couldn't follow, especially when they started talking about food and elaborate dishes (one of the protagonists is a former celebrity chef). Watching/Listening: 4 episodes of 'Real Humans', 2 episodes of 'Le dessous des cartes', 1 episode of 'X:enius' on arte and 7 episodes of 'les carnets de l'economie' on France culture. = 3.4 movies according to the bot. I might comment on these later... Non Challenge related stuff: Accent Reduction: I've been experimenting with accent reduction methods. I'm rather self-conscious whenever I have to speak French, so I'd really like to improve my accent. For the moment I spend about 10 minutes each day saying sentences such as 'Strasbourg est une ville dans le Nord-Est de la France, situee sur la rive gauche du Rhin' over and over again. I've only just begun with this, so I'll comment on it in depth later. Anyway, all the French input I've been getting this last week is already having an impact. While I'm typing this, my brain keeps suggesting French words and phrases to me. Czech Almost all of my new Czech DVDs won't work on my laptop. I'm assuming this has something to do with copy protection etc. I don't own a DVD player, so I'm momentarily bereaved of most of the material I was planning to use. I went to my local library in search of for material, but it seems as if the DVD producing industry in Germany is intentionally working towards effacing any sliver of Czech dubbing there could be on a DVD. Seriously. My library has a huge collection of old Czech movies and TV series, none of which come with the original audio track. After some introspection I've also come to the realization that my motivation for Czech was low to begin with. There are some movies which I really wanted to watch (Alois Nebel and Burning Bush are on the top of my list), but I'm not motivated enough to just watch anything for the sake of the language. I'm very motivated for Italian on the other hand, so I'll try to profit from that for now and come back to Czech later this year. Japanese I watched the movie 'Furusato Japan'. Italian I will update Italian later. After having to write tweets all day I feel like I'm constantly writing about what I'm doing instead of actually doing stuff. I still want to watch 'Pranzo di ferragosto' tonight, so I better get offline now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Isarin Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5429 days ago 34 posts - 41 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Japanese Studies: Czech, Mandarin, Italian | Message 3 of 9 05 May 2014 at 10:25pm | IP Logged |
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This text wasn't supposed to be as long and I was going to fix the diacritical marks after typing everything I wanted to say. Now I'm too lazy to do that...(I might also put it on lang-8 if I have enough time to fix it tomorrow). I'm actually quite scared about putting this text out there, I just wrote it without worrying too much about the grammar, and I'm not sure whether half the verb forms I chose even exist. I guess after years of lurking I need to get used to posting again.
French/Frencais Ce week-end, j'ai lu "L'appel de l'ange" de Guillaume Musso pour le "Super Challenge". Je n'avais jamais lu un livre de cet auteur, et en fait je n'aime pas trop les thrillers. Mais comme j'avais lu que Musso et un des auteurs contemporains le plus lus en France, je pensais qu'il me faudrait lire qc de lui, juste pour essayer si je l'aimerais ou non. Ce livre traite d'un homme et une femme qui, par hasard, echangent leurs portables a un aeroport. Une fois rentre chez eux, ils se apercoivent de cet accident. Mais comme ils sont tous les deux tres curieux, ils commencent a farfouiller dans les fichiers de l'autre.... et comme ca, l'histoire se developpe... Voila, mon opinion sur ce livre. Ce sont juste quelques idees que j'avais pendant je le lisais. Ne m'en voulez pas si vous n'etes pas d'accord, j'aimerais bien en discuter :) En somme, ce livre m'a plait beaucoup plus que je pensais auparavant. J'aime bien les personnages principaux. Ils sont, de la plupart, bien imagines et interessants. L'histoire est au meme temps drolle (1ere partie) et tres serieuse (les parties suivantes). POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD Si vous avez pas encore lu ce livre et si vous le voulez lire, faites attention... En lisant ce livre, je pensais parfois que le deroulement des evenements n'est pas tout a fait logique. Ils n'ont pas les mots cles pour leurs portables ou quoi? Eh ben, c'est une histoire, je le sais, mais quand meme.... Il y a aussi un truc qui m'a tellement enerve. Au debut de la troisieme partie du livre, un homme est assassine par le service secret et une fille est enlevee par quelqu'un. La maniere de la narration et comme si l'auteur s'ingeniait a augmenter le suspense et les scenes sont si plein de cliches qu'ils m'ont fait rouler les yeux. En plus, je pense que ce meurtre est plutot inutile et illogique et va mal avec le style du livre. A vrai dire, en pesant un peu plus de tout cela, il me semble que le style entier de la troisieme partie du livre va mal aux autres parties. Italian Lesson 36 of Assimil (passive wave). I've added a second passive wave / review wave since reaching lesson 25, so I also reviewed lesson 11 today. I spent some more time inputting the "Grund- und Aufbauwortschatz" into Anki. My deck now contains about 1250 words (60 of which are still new to me). I'm not studying the grammar properly yet, mainly because I enjoy reading graded readers too much. This weekend, I finished reading "Mistero tra le baite". It's a really pretty, monolingual graded reader that comes with the entire text on CD and many exercises for reading comprehension, listening comprehension, vocabulary and grammar. It's supposedly for people studying to reach A2, but I understood what was going on just fine. The series is called "Imparare Leggendo", I'd definitely recommend it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Isarin Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5429 days ago 34 posts - 41 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Japanese Studies: Czech, Mandarin, Italian | Message 4 of 9 10 May 2014 at 7:30pm | IP Logged |
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The first 10 day have passed and so far everything is going well. I'm still highly motivated for both French and Italian and I've definitely made a lot of progress in Italian (I know about diminishing marginal returns of course, but I'm still on the nice, steep part of the curve for now).
French Reading: According to the bot, I read 9 books in the first week (Actually it was mostly just one, but 50 pages count as one book). I read the book in three stages, 150 pages. I don't think that my schedule will allow me to read every day, but I feel that reading would be much more effective if I could do it in smaller bites, such as 40 pages per day. Reading in French is not very hard for me, I know that some people have been wondering how one could read as many French books in just one week. But even before signing up for the SC, I had a personal goal of reading at least 1000 pages in French per month so I'm well trained. I also read extensively and almost never look up unknown words, not because there aren't any, but because I strictly separate between reading (fun) and vocabulary learning (hard work, made a little easier by reading a lot). Listening: 6 hours of watching arte. I already looked through this weeks TV guide, there are at least 4-5 hours of programmes I'd like to watch next week. I might have to record some of them. Speaking: I spent about 1,5h discussing the upcoming European Elections, the French Green Party, TTIP, Mali and the horrible situation in the Centrafrique at my language meet-up. I didn't continue working on my accent. I hope that I can motivate myself to spend some more time on that next week. Grammar: So. Here comes the bad part. All the reading and watching TV is taking of my time for more “active” ways of studying. I sometimes watched arte late at night instead of going to sleep, and thus felt too tired to get up 30 minutes earlier in the morning for some grammar exercises... so I ended up doing only 30 minutes this week. Writing: Only what I wrote above. Sadly, I still haven't found the time to put it on lang-8. Italian Courses: Assimil: 41. Saying goodbye to Ida and Francesca for now...I'm still very impressed with the way Assimil casually teaches all kind of important grammar points. This week I've realised the importance of the 'Exercises' and the 'Fill-in-the-gap' drills, so I've also spent more time on reviewing those. Reading: 63 pages I read two entire books in Italian this week! Well, graded readers which had about 30 pages each. This made me very happy. One of the books, 'Nonna per passione', had been lying on my bedside table ever since I started studying Italian. I had initially planned to read it before April 30th, but missing my goal by just one week isn't to bad either. Vocabulary: About 20 'new' words per day. Grammar: Not much progress. Going through a grammar book is so very tedious, I'll have to find another way of doing this. It works fine for French, but then I already know French grammar. Speaking/Writing: None Japanese Read 2 articles on NHK & some tweets. Czech Talked to a Polish girl in Czech for about 20 minutes at a meet-up. Mandarin 30 minutes of listening. Comments I was initially planning to spend about 2h per day on Italian. Since I never really tracked how much time I actually spend on studying every day, I was pretty surprised to see that I didn't do more than 1,5h daily. Which is alright, considering that I was usually very happy with what I got done. This is my first time participating in any challenges and this is also the first time I have actually tracked the time I spent on a language as minutely. It definitely helps to see how much time I spend with one language, but always tweeting my stats takes up a lot of time. Nevertheless, I was very interested in the thread about time tracking apps that popped up earlier this week. I'm still drawn between “pen, watch and paper” and a more sophisticated way of tracking my learning hours (one that will produce pretty pie charts and such). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4799 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 5 of 9 11 May 2014 at 12:33am | IP Logged |
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Nice log!
I think sources like this http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ivysilani/ may be helpful for your Czech SC. I hope you can watch the archive even from outside the Czech Republic. ANd than there are the pirate sources but those are against the rules to share on this forum. But they are not hard to google out :-) The czechs pirate a lot because we do not have the legal and reasonably paid alternatives. Netflix like services are likely to come here in the next century at the earliest :-( For your dvds, you might succeed with another player or by copying the content to the computer first. There must be a way. It is funny, that there are dvds with original Czech movies without the original Czech sound :-D but there is surely quite a lot to watch, if you get hands on a copy. One of the few genres we can be proud of are movies and series for children. Our fairy tales and "Večerníčky" are something even adults like to come back to (for example every Christmas) Merci pour l'info sur un livre interessant, je cherche toujours des idees nouvelles por mes SCs. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5124 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 6 of 9 11 May 2014 at 8:22am | IP Logged |
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Interesting log! I had the same problem with my Russian videos, but solved it by taking a really old PC we
had at home and changed its settings to accept Russian DVDs. That means I cannot use Norwegian DVDs on it, but I can watch those on my regular PC. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Isarin Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5429 days ago 34 posts - 41 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Japanese Studies: Czech, Mandarin, Italian | Message 7 of 9 12 May 2014 at 10:09pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you both for your comments! After spending some more time with Google last night I was able to resolve the problem partially. Some of the DVDs now work (a matter of downloading the right codecs).
@Cavesa: I didn't think of that! Ceska Televize is a great resource indeed. I can access some of the content, but not the movies and series. Many of the videos have near to perfect sub-titling, too. Most importantly, Bob and Bobek works :) There used to be an animated series about Czech history, do you happen to know that one? I forgot what it is called. I was so wrapped up in my language learning this weekend that I actually missed the EUROVISION song contest. So, instead of studying, I took a tour through youtube tonight, looking through all the different entries. Apparently no more then 5 artists chose to sing in a language other than English? (I'm only mentioning this to make it relevant language-wise/to veil what actually happened - I was only going to look at the winning song and subsequently got lost somewhere in the last 20 years of Eurovision history....I can't believe the sisters Tolmachevy are 17 already. Also, why didn't Latvia make it to the finals?). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Isarin Tetraglot Newbie Germany Joined 5429 days ago 34 posts - 41 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Japanese Studies: Czech, Mandarin, Italian | Message 8 of 9 16 June 2014 at 4:16pm | IP Logged |
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I've been very busy lately, so I couldn't post as often as I had initially planned. Sorry. The 6 Week Challenge ended last week, so here are some thoughts on that...
6 Week Challenge Italian This was the first 6WC I participated in, so I didn't know what to expect of myself. Consequently, I set all of my goals way to low! I had already reached my goals (even those which I had not stated above for fear of utterly failing them) after four weeks, and after that my motivation to aim even higher dropped. I was also much busier in the first two weeks of June than I had been in May (or... my time management was worse, which amounts to the same). In May, I managed to dedicate more than 1 hour per day to studying Italian while still getting I good headstart with the SC. I guess the conclusions I'm drawing from this experience is to have more confidence in my own time management skills and to aim higher, but also to formulate more intermediate goals that I can aim for. Assimil Troubles By the start of the 6WC I had already established I firm daily routine regarding my Assimil lesson. Everything went very well until I hit lesson 50/the active wave. Having to add the active wave to my daily sessions destroyed my routine, which I have not been able to successfully reestablish since. For the last two weeks I didn't even manage to do my daily Assimil lesson properly. I'm now at the 66th lesson in the passive wave and the 15th lesson in the active wave. My next goal therefore is obviously to reestablish a routine. I will travel to Italy in the middle of August, so I hope to finish the Assimil book until than. This means that I will have to do more than one lesson on some days. Japanese: Accent Troubles I've recently been trying to focus on different regional accents. I like watching Japanese Asadramas (Morning Drama) and Renzoku Terebi Shosetsu because they usually have a strong regional focus. Also, the episodes are only 15 minutes each, which facilitates including them in my schedule. Aaanyway. So I watched all 156 episodes (= about 40 hours) of Amachan sometime between last October and now. Most people in this drama and especially the main character speak with a strong Iwate accent. Then I remembered that Musashi no Ken was also set in Iwate, so I started watching that one (90 episodes à 20min, but I'm only at episode 10 so far). Now I can't seem to get rid of saying 'nashite' whenever I mean to say 'nande' or 'doushite' or asking questions with be etc...Tohoku is my favorite region in Japan, though. By the way, instead of saying 'jee jee' like they do in Amachan, Musashi uses 'jaa jaa'. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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