Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Super Challenge Update thread 2014-15

  Tags: Super Challenge
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
198 messages over 25 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 14 ... 24 25 Next >>
kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
Joined 4648 days ago

1386 posts - 3054 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 105 of 198
30 June 2014 at 11:53pm | IP Logged 
June Update

I've been resisting the temptation to star chase. I figure it's better for me to try and keep things balanced, and my goal was to have my first stars in September. I'm so tantalizingly close, though ...


Italian Movies and TV (11.1)

Il commissario Montalbano. Season 1.

This is really enjoyable, and has a nice mix of detective-work and more personal drama. I had watched part of season 7 and was lost. It's much easier to follow from the beginning. Also, Sicily looks so dang beautiful in this show that I want to go there now.




Gomorrah. (Matteo Garone, 2008). My first movie fail of the challenge. It's all guns and violence and hopelessness without any insight or context; the kind of show that makes the critics gush about how authentic and real it is. As if any of them know anything about the ghetto, and what's real and what's not.


Italian Books (10.3)

Haven't finished a complete book yet. Harry Potter is so damn long!


French Books (17.2)

La planète des singes. (Pierre Boulle, 1963)

A classic sci-fi novel of ideas, and a relatively easy read. It's different enough from the Charlton Heston movie that I stayed interested throughout, though there are a few rough patches at the end that didn't make much sense at all. Still, recommended for sci-fi fans.


French Movies and Podcasts (19.8)

Irma Vep. (Olivier Assayas, 1996)

This is the coolest movie. A has-been director brings Maggie Cheung in from Hong Kong to star in a remake of a silent film classic, Les vampires. Maggie Cheung's character doesn't speak French, and the crew communicates with her in various degrees of broken English. I got a certain Lost in Translation vibe, except this time it's the Europeans who aren't always making sense.




I've been listening to a lot of podcasts; my favorites (i.e. the ones that I can actually understand) tend to be the stories on France culture that I'm already familiar with. I find I get really lost in 'new' stories. History podcasts have also been hit or miss for me, the I'm slowly getting better at following Au coeur de l'histoire

Favorite stories of the last month:

Peter Pan, ou le garçon qui ne voulait pas grandir
Le Tour d'écrou de Henry James
De la terre à la lune de Jules Verne
Le Fantôme de Canterville de Oscar Wilde



Edited by kanewai on 30 June 2014 at 11:59pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6356 days ago

9753 posts - 15779 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish

 
 Message 106 of 198
01 July 2014 at 3:13am | IP Logged 
Last weekend, I focused on Italian. There wasn't quite as much football on as before:

28 Jun 2014 it-ch: brasile-cile 1:1 95 minutes (I watched the extra time and penalties in Danish)
28 Jun 2014 it-ch: colombia-uruguay 2:0
29 Jun 2014 it-ch: olanda-messico 2:1
29 Jun 2014 it-ch: costa rica-grecia 140 minutes

reading:
28 Jun 2014 san pietroburgo e dintorni
29 Jun 2014 john foot - calcio

I tweeted two books, but I started the first one the day I bought it in Peterhof. For Tadoku I recorded a total of 77 pages in Italian.
As for the second one, it's a huge 600-page book about the history of Italian football. I read the sections about the referees and about the two teams from Torino, including lots of information about the tragedy of 1949 and its aftermath.

On a lighter note, I now have both kinds of silver badges in Italian :)
1 person has voted this message useful



Jeffers
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4668 days ago

2151 posts - 3960 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German

 
 Message 107 of 198
02 July 2014 at 1:06pm | IP Logged 
One mini-project I had for the first two months was to get to know Amélie really well. I have the script in English and in French, and read carefully through the French. It turns out the English script is pretty awful, so I made some corrections while I put them together into a parallel script. More importantly, I created a spreadsheet of vocabulary, essentially every word in the script except common words. In other words, any words not in the top 1000 French words. In most cases I included the frequency, IPA and a sample sentence.

After reading the script 3 times, I watched the film without subs for the first time (I'd seen it with subs about 5 times). It was an odd experience: I knew what everything everyone said meant, but a lot of the time they spoke so fast I still couldn't pick out all the words. The fast paced, run-on sentence narration is one of the stylistic features of the film, and I suspect even native speakers wouldn't be picking up every word of the narrator unless they were really paying attention.

Here's a link to the vocab spreadsheet in my drop box. I hope it works! If anyone wants to import them into Anki or something, I'd be grateful if they could share it.

As it would be copyrighted, I can't share the parallel script like that. PM if you want more info on the script.
3 persons have voted this message useful



VivianJ5
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4021 days ago

81 posts - 133 votes 
Speaks: English*, French

 
 Message 108 of 198
02 July 2014 at 3:21pm | IP Logged 
Jeffers wrote:
One mini-project I had for the first two months was to get to know Amélie really well. I have the
script in English and in French, and read carefully through the French. It turns out the English script is pretty awful,
so I made some corrections while I put them together into a parallel script. More importantly, I created a
spreadsheet of vocabulary, essentially every word in the script except common words. In other words, any words
not in the top 1000 French words. In most cases I included the frequency, IPA and a sample sentence.

...

Here's a link to the vocab spreadsheet in my drop box. I hope it works! If
anyone wants to import them into Anki or something, I'd be grateful if they could share it.

As it would be copyrighted, I can't share the parallel script like that. PM if you want more info on the script.


Jeffers, this is wonderful! I just browsed through it, and although I haven't seen "Amelie" in a few years, and only saw
it once, I'm looking forward to watching again after having reviewed your spreadsheet. Lots of great expressions,
which are very hard to catch in normal conversation.

Thank you!

Edited by VivianJ5 on 02 July 2014 at 3:23pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Mohave
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/Mohave1
Joined 3766 days ago

291 posts - 444 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: French

 
 Message 109 of 198
03 July 2014 at 2:43am | IP Logged 
Jeffers wrote:
One mini-project I had for the first two months was to get to know Amélie really well. I
have the script in English and in French, and read carefully through the French. It turns out the English script
is pretty awful, so I made some corrections while I put them together into a parallel script. More importantly, I
created a spreadsheet of vocabulary, essentially every word in the script except common words. In other
words, any words not in the top 1000 French words. In most cases I included the frequency, IPA and a
sample sentence.

After reading the script 3 times, I watched the film without subs for the first time (I'd seen it with subs about 5
times). It was an odd experience: I knew what everything everyone said meant, but a lot of the time they
spoke so fast I still couldn't pick out all the words. The fast paced, run-on sentence narration is one of the
stylistic features of the film, and I suspect even native speakers wouldn't be picking up every word of the
narrator unless they were really paying attention.

Here's a link to the vocab spreadsheet in my drop box. I hope it works! If
anyone wants to import them into Anki or something, I'd be grateful if they could share it.

As it would be copyrighted, I can't share the parallel script like that. PM if you want more info on the script.


Jeffers -

Thanks so very much for sharing this! This is fantastic! I watched Amélie once for the Super Challenge, but
planned to watch it again. I plan to study the vocabulary list, and perhaps, add some of this to my Flashcard
Deck, and then watch again. Thanks again!
1 person has voted this message useful



wv girl
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4998 days ago

174 posts - 330 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Spanish

 
 Message 110 of 198
03 July 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged 
I've finished Twilight in Spanish. It took about 4 weeks, but my reading wasn't consistently every day. Oddly,
when on vacation, my reading went down! Seems keeping an eye on the kids when they're in the ocean or pool
really cuts into my own "free" time. Really feel my vocabulary improved. I've tried to not just read for meaning
but to polish some common words and make them more active. For example, after a quote, you know you can
just substitute "said," but it's good to get familiar with "murmured, mumbled, mused," etc. And this novel had a
lot of expressions that it used over and over again. Although I'm not taken with the story, I bought the 2nd
book, as it was only $3. It's good to be able to read more easily. I certainly couldn't have done it without the
work I put in last year on the Challenge. Nice to see results!

Libros:
1. Crepusculo, 504 paginas

Haven't been watching anything on Netfix or online.   One of my summer goals is to get some French and
Spanish channels, to make watching/listening more accessible. Maybe I will look for some Spanish podcasts.

1 person has voted this message useful



Solfrid Cristin
Heptaglot
Winner TAC 2011 & 2012
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 5093 days ago

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

 
 Message 111 of 198
07 July 2014 at 12:09am | IP Logged 
June challenge update:

The first weekend I saw 2 films, and I felt fairly confident that I could do better, so I did not register that. The
second weekend I did - nothing. And the third weekend I did - nothing. ( Nothing language related anyway,
but I have made a few hundred glasses of rose jelly :-)

Then the last weekend I listened to the entire 11.5 hours of audiobook of Harry Potter in Russian - and half
an hour of it again for good measure. Those 12 hours were my maximum weekend effort.

I did not get to do any reading I could register, but I timed myself over a few pages to an average of 5
minutes per page, without looking up anything.

At some point during the challenge we will do this again, and I trust that my results will be better then :-)
1 person has voted this message useful



kanewai
Triglot
Senior Member
United States
justpaste.it/kanewai
Joined 4648 days ago

1386 posts - 3054 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese
Studies: Italian, Spanish

 
 Message 112 of 198
17 July 2014 at 1:46am | IP Logged 
July challenge - French

I used L'homme qui plantait des arbes, a ten-page short story and 30-minute
animation. I did it over the course of four days rather than back to back.

Round one - watched the video without subtitles. I understood the story, though missed
some transitions

Round two - I read the text straight through, with no dictionary. I understood 95% of
it; there were a couple dozen words and a small handful of phrases I struggled with.

Round three - Read the text while the animation played. This is where it got
interesting; I found that it really calibrated the way I read and the internal
voice I use. I actually understood most of the words that I hadn't understood the first
round of reading.

Round four - I re-watched the video, and was really surprised at the huge leap in my
comprehension.

It's interesting how different techniques work at different stages in our learning. I
had done variations of listen-read before, and it was useful, but it was always slow
work. This is the first time where I noticed such a quick improvement over such a short
period, and it seems to have carried over into my comprehension of other podcasts.

I followed EMK when he was doing something similar with Buffy, but I don't think I was
at the right point where it was useful for me. Whereas now this is something I want to
integrate more into my studying. My reading skills have really outpaced my listening
skills; this will help to bring my listening up to par.

I'll try this with Italian next week. I'm not expecting as big a leap.

animation
text: www.inlibroveritas.net/oeuvres/16698/l-homme-qui-plantait-de s-arbres

And for those who missed the notice (it got buried pretty quickly in the other thread),
here's the challenge:

Solfrid Cristin wrote:
   
The July challenge is the following:

Pick something you have both as text, audio and/or film (at least two of them) and do
first one, then the other, then come back to the first and see what improvements you
have made, and try and describe them to us.

This one is an all month challenge, you are not limited to the week ends.


Edited by kanewai on 17 July 2014 at 2:35am



1 person has voted this message useful



This discussion contains 198 messages over 25 pages: << Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25  Next >>


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.4063 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.