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BAnna’s 2015 Polylog GerRusSpanTurk | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4620 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish | Message 1 of 7 24 December 2014 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
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Going to start a new log. Who knows how much I will post, but this is just for my own musings in any case since I'm not joining a TAC team this year, but will be a lone wolf independent.
Goals: German: complete SuperChallenge 100/100 by EOY, re-take written part of C2 in October (or maybe April, but probably not). Have a pile of German books. Russian: restart, probably after completing Spanish SuperChallenge (midyear?) Spanish: complete SuperChallenge 100/100 by EOY. Am currently binge-watching Dr. Mata. Turkish: restart in Feb and pick up enough to be useful in trip to Turkey planned in Fall Edited by BAnna on 24 December 2014 at 1:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bjorn Diglot Senior Member Norway Joined 4866 days ago 244 posts - 286 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: German, French | Message 2 of 7 08 January 2015 at 2:02am | IP Logged |
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Happy New Year! And good luck with your language studying !
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4620 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish | Message 3 of 7 04 February 2015 at 6:14pm | IP Logged |
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@Bjorn, thanks for the good wishes. Yikes! I can't believe I didn't make a single entry here in January...
Been working and travelling a lot, so not online much recently, but am trying to catch up reading the logs of my old teammates from previous TACS. Did get to practice my German a bit on my latest trip overseas. And my passive comprehension of British English-;) It's good I'm not on a TAC team this year, I'd be the lamest teammate ever. I've restarted Pimsleur Turkish, but have only done a handful of lessons so far. In two weeks time, we will have a Turkish-speaking visitor staying with us for a few weeks, so I hope to get some practice in then. Have done almost no Russian so far. Mostly I've been spending my time trying to finish my German and Spanish SuperChallenge: been watching tons of Spanish stuff, mostly Gran Hotel, but some other things as well, such as episodes of Dr. Mata and some movies (Canela, Un viaje de 10 metros) and documentaries (Que caramba es la vida-good one about women mariachi singers in Mexico City, some others on Gabriel García Márquez, the opera singer Alfredo Kraus and Hugo Chávez's interpreter). I also finished reading a mystery set in 19th century Madrid by Jerónimo Tristante, "El misterio de la casa Aranda"-started out good but then just became ridiculous and just started a translated book by Kazuo Ishiguro, "Nunca me abandones". In German, I finished reading Sandman Slim "Höllen Dämmerung", about a guy who returns to LA from Hell to wreak vengeance, and have made a decent dent into "Heimatmuseum" by Siegfried Lenz, which was a Christmas gift from one of my skype language partners. That's going to take a while since it's nearly 800 pages long. I'm also trying to wrap up reading "Sommerstück", which is actually kind of boring, but I'm over half done and it's not very long, so I feel compelled to finish for some unknown reason. It was one of the texts we were assigned for the C2 exam that I didn't quite complete. I also have watched some mediocre TV programs and on one of my plane rides, a German-dubbed version of 22 Jump Street. British Airways has a terrible selection of German movies. There were only two. It was that one or a superhero thing, maybe it was Guardians of the Galaxy? Have done no writing in German beyond a few emails. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4620 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish | Message 4 of 7 06 April 2015 at 2:49am | IP Logged |
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I haven't posted here in ages, but better late than never. Made it through over 100 books and films in both Spanish and German as part of the Super Challenge, so I feel that is "done", though I'll probably still dabble a bit and maybe add a few more before the year is out. I've been mostly reading and watching English language stuff lately. Since I was immersed in other languages the last couple of years, I feel a bit out of touch with a long list of books to read and movies to watch.
Russian has gone by the wayside. :( I do occasionally get to read some signage or overhear a conversation at a cafe, but that's about it for now. I want to get back to this language, but have no firm plans at the moment. I restarted Pimsleur Turkish, but didn't make too much progress before I dropped that again. Man, am I lame... :( I use my Spanish all the time, so no worries there. I absolutely loved Cien Años de Soledad, which was my final book for the SC so I'll definitely read more of his books. I went to a German standup comic last week, which sparked my desire to get back on my game with German and to finally begin to prepare for the written C2 exam (the part I failed last time). I get to practice some German with work colleagues, but it's not consistent so I'm going to try a distance learning thing with a tutor. I don't know if I'll be ready by October and have a lot of other stuff going on, but I'm going to forge ahead and see how it goes. The obsessive part of me feels like that exam is really unfinished business, so it's something I'm going to eventually have to tackle, no matter what. Do I miss active language learning? Yes!!! and undoubtedly I will get back to it at some point. I've seen some improvement in my own health situation and that of my family members, so I'm hopeful I'll be able to get back into it in the near future, though I will try to avoid my previous obsession, which was a little bit much. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4620 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish | Message 5 of 7 13 June 2015 at 2:56pm | IP Logged |
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Egad! It's been forever since I've updated here.
Just returned from 3 weeks in Germany and Switzerland (mostly work, but some pleasure as well). Now I'm yet again inspired to get back on the horse and get back into German again. I managed quite well, including an unplanned doctor visit to a non-English speaking physician. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to add to my routine. For the past 6 months, it's been only reading sporadically, watching films and interacting with my skype partners. Maybe I'll buckle down and take a grammar course. That's about the only thing that will ensure I do some writing and focused study. I will have to have another surgery later this year, so I am postponing the C2 exam indefinitely. Maybe it will be a goal for 2016. With Spanish, I basically use the language daily (reading, watching films and speaking). Spanish grammar doesn't interest me much since I have a good enough grounding that it's only the more literary or higher level grammar points I would need to focus on, and I just don't have the energy to push for perfection right now with other things going on in my life. Russian is dead in the water, at least for now, but I'd like to come back to it sometime. I did overhear a delightful child speaking to his Papa in Russian and could pick out a few words. I did get a couple of chances to practice my novice level Turkish whilst in Germany. My vocabulary is quite limited: Thank you, please, etc. We have postponed our planned trip to Turkey until next year, so I have a bit more time to improve. Time is the biggest challenge. I do physical therapy and water therapy to address some of my physical health issues, and I do meditation and restorative yoga for my emotional health, so it doesn't leave me much time for language study on top of my work schedule. No matter, I can enjoy languages to whatever extent I'm able to, in order to have a deeper experience of life's variety. I have already on countless occasions been able to converse with people in at least a couple of this Earth's many languages that I would not have been able to if I had been limited to English, so my life has already been immeasurably enriched by studying languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BAnna Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4620 days ago 409 posts - 616 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Turkish | Message 6 of 7 28 June 2015 at 10:23pm | IP Logged |
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EN: The below just says somethings about me listening to a pretty good audiobook in German that my friend gave me called Fairground, which was banned in East Germany although its author was a true believer in the socialist state. And that I've signed up to take a C1 class since my German is getting rusty. In Spanish, I'm watching a historical-crime-soap opera called Dr. Mata. It's based on a true story about a smarmy con-man/murderer active in the 40s in Colombia. Besides the usual love stuff, it has some historical background about Jorge Gaitan, a populist politician who was assassinated in 1948 (possibly at the direction of the CIA?) and whose death led to decades of political violence in Colombia.
DE: Als ich in Deutschland war, hat mir meine Freundin verschiedene H�rb�cher geschenkt. Ich habe neulich einen geh�rt, n�mlich, Rummelplatz von Werner Br�unig. Es gab ein Ver�ffentlichungsverbot f�r den Roman in der DDR, obwohl der Autor ein Gl�ubiger in Sozialismus war. Ich fand das Buch ziemlich gut. Was sonst ist neu bei mir? Ich habe schon in einem Deutschkurs eingeschrieben (C1). Ich brauche meine Sprachf�higkeit aufzufrischen, ohne Zweifel. ES: Y �qu� es nuevo conmigo relacionado con el castellano? Sigo viendo la novela Dr. Mata, que sale en el canal Fox-Mundo. Se trata de la historia verdadera de un estafador y asesino en 1948 en Colombia y aunque tiene las tonter�as t�picas de las telenovelas, tambi�n he aprendido algo de la historia de ese pa�s, porque se trata tambi�n del pol�tico populista Jorge Gait�n, quien fue en ese mismo a�o asesinado. Es todav�a desconocido cual papel tuvo la CIA con su muerte. Su asesinato en Bogot� produjo enormes protestas y inici� una larga �poca de violencia pol�tica en Colombia. Edit: don't know why I have the character issues. The preview looked ok and my browser is set for unicode. Basically above in German are umlauted vowels and in Spanish are accented vowels or tilda'ed Ns. Edited by BAnna on 28 June 2015 at 10:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Nieng Zhonghan Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Antarctica Joined 3669 days ago 108 posts - 315 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Japanese*, Spanish, Galician Studies: Finnish, Icelandic, Armenian, Mongolian Studies: Old English, Russian, English, German, Korean, Mandarin | Message 7 of 7 29 June 2015 at 10:50pm | IP Logged |
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BAnna,
I have had a similar problem before, so let me try to clarify what has happened in your log. This is a problem with the forum software which essentially means it can't handle longer chunks of German, Spanish or any other language’s texts without turning some of the characters into junk. Any long uninterrupted string of characters (the cut-off number for the Latin script appears to be 59) gets broken up by automatically inserted spaces. I think this might have been put in place in order to prevent spam links from working, since the only thing that could be longer than 60 characters in any alphabetic script is a URL; therefore, for some reason this causes an extra problem for languages written without spaces such or languages that require “special letters” such as umlauts in German by messing with the character encoding. The only way to avoid it is to insert spaces between words before and perhaps those you are having problems. For instance, “gehört” requires an umlaut. So, you can use “space” in between them (words before and after) and it should solve your issue. It will probably prevent this happing next time you post something. I suggest you also using line breaks together with the spaces insertion. If it works, we can advise other users who run into the same problem in the future. PS: Be aware that there is time to edit your post and make “corrections” in your text. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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