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What Expug is doing in 2015 (TAC n more) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| yuhakko Tetraglot Senior Member FranceRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4419 days ago 414 posts - 582 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishB2, EnglishC2, Spanish, Japanese Studies: Korean, Norwegian, Mandarin | Message 25 of 364 08 January 2015 at 12:42am | IP Logged | ||
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哎呀，你说得错。 如过我看一看一个Journey across China的话，我并不懂。我也许可以看得懂比较 （我
不觉得这样），可是你一定比我听的好多了。 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sooniye Diglot Groupie Sweden Joined 3684 days ago 44 posts - 52 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Spanish, Danish, Turkish, Japanese, Croatian, Hindi, Hungarian, Albanian | Message 26 of 364 08 January 2015 at 6:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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Looking forward to follow your log, such interesting languages!
I wish you the best this year and hope that you will reach your goals. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 27 of 364 08 January 2015 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you, Soonie, you also have a nice selection!
Yesterday I managed to do 2 whole chapters for Duolingo Italian. Note to self: not to take placement levels for Duolingo. It only makes it harder to know which lesson is due next. My point is activating my Italian, so I started from the beginning, even if the placement test put me halfway through the course. The day started with a well-known Catholic song in the Papiamento video, now sung in Papiamento. It was only an excerpt, and unfortunately I googled for the whole lyrics and couldn't find them. I wonder if the original song is the Brazilian one, and this indeed seems to be so. A refreshment with learning Estonian. Today's lesson is the first but last one, and it was much shorter, at least in the explanations and exercises. It is all over tomorrow, and I will have to decide what to do next. Someday I will have to drill grammar consistently. Maybe I find a Russian textbook with good exercises; if not, I'll have to get back to Basic Course in Estonian or Tuldava's textbook just for the exercises. I know, i know that will be for my own good. Just to make things different: it was a good day with Assimil Russian, too. Now that I know more words, I can pay more attention to the missing ones. Same case as above: it's the first but last lesson and maybe they decided to cool down in the last moments. Learn Norwegian - Lesson 04 Jeg går på mange forelesninger i universitetet. Jeg går også på noen seminarrom, hvor vi diskuterer problemer. På universittetet er det flere språklaboratorier med mange lydbandspillere eller kassettspillere. I språklaboratoriene er det mye utstyr: bånd og bøker på mange språk, grammofonplater og i noen laboratorier også en videoskjerm, under taket, foran klassen. Bak lærerens plass er det en tavle, hvor læreren skriver eller tegner. I'm really enjoying Learn Norwegian, I'm studying it almost intensively and filling in important gaps in my knowledge. Today i took about an hour to look through my past log and check my plan for upcoming material for Russian. Now I havethe updated list. There are two Linguaphone editions, but I'm starting with the traditional one, similar to the one I used for Georgian. There is also the great Modern...Grammar from Routledge. Also a lot of bilingual readers to enhance my SC count, even when counting pages by half (well, only technically, I mean). It was worth the time spent, for now I know clearly what to do. I'm happy I lived long enough to watch Les Femmes du 6ème Étage till the scene when Madame Joubert finds in the bedside table of his husband a copy of the old L'Espagnol Sans Peine! (The film is from 2011 and takes place in contemporary days, so the idea was probably to make it look vintage and emotional, familiar to use an old edition). Best day of reading in Russian so far. I understood long excerpts from Divergent before turning to the original in English. I'm more convinced of my theory of languages rotating themselves, lol. German video wasn't that bad, and the rest was ok. Today the choice was Italian. I did some Duolingo (two chapers) and now will try to catch up with French films for the Super Challenge, as I'm 120 hours away from my goal. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 28 of 364 09 January 2015 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today is the day i'd finish two textbooks, so let's start by reviewing the first one:
It is Estnisch Lehrbuch by Cornelius Hasselblat, not to be confused with Lerbuch der estnischen Sprache by the well-known series Buske. This book has no audio, but most of the lessons have at least 3-pages long dialogues, which makes this the most extensive source of Estonian dialogues in the textbooks I've seen so far, either English- or German-based. The grammar explanations are pretty clear and the grammar is introduced in a reasonable way. It is only the vocabulary curve that is too steep, because you are introduced to those 3-page dialogues with no translation. Some of the dialogues sound a bit nonsense in terms of content, i.e. regarding how the stories end, but in terms of language usage they are comprehensive enough that I feel my Estonian level progressed to a comfortable A2 after that. What I need mostly now is practicing grammar, because I chose to just look at the exercises and their answers - they are given in parallel - instead of trying to write down the exercises first on my own. Now for the next resource. Eesti keel ma armastan osa is too conversational for my Russian (it's Russian-based). There is an УЧЕБНИК ЭСТОНСКОГО ЯЗЫКА which is entirely bilingual, also for the grammar explanations, and is OCR'ed in both Russian and Estonian, which makes it the easiest to deal with. I'm in doubt between E nagu eesti (a monolingual textbook,not OCR-ed) and the course from Panglosskool 'Estonian Language and Mind', from which i will basically use double-subtitled videos, that is, it would be close to starting native materials. Will go for the video-course Estonian Language and Mind and try to read the blog Estonian Language as well. Then I finished Assimil Perfectionnement Russe! It is always a feeling of accomplishment to finish a so extense intermediate textbook. The most blatant demonstration of how up-to-date this book is is this paragraph at the final lesson: У вас пока ещё нет русских друзей? Нашли из-за чего расстраиваться ! Это в наш-то безумный век Интернета и социальных сетей? Quite encouraging. But now on the book itself: I believe the vocabulary learning curve was still too steep. I had been through 3 beginner editions of Assimil and this book still put me a bit off, in the sense that I couldn't absorb most of the vocabulary being introduced each lesson. But then it's largely a fault on my own, since I didn't learn the lessons from the beginner editions and from this one with the intensity a language like Russian demands. If you expect to just go through the lessons once and learn what you need, you probably will find trouble. So, in a sense I wasted this book, and I should have waited a bit longer before starting it, so that I could pay attention to the subtleties in the colloquial language that this book adresses. Now I have to find other sources of short stories and humorous dialogues that will still allow me to go on with grammar learning, while keeping working on the native materials I'm already working on. My grammar is far from being a B1. Anyway, Russian has a lot of resources so I'm sure I will find something suitable and will be brave enough to do production exercises attentively next time so I can master at least the most obvious declension and aspect topics. What next? I will go for Linguaphone Russian 1961 edition so I can keep working with audio. Learn Norwegian - lesson 05 It was a nice lesson which started with a long dialogue, very practical and illustrative of the needs of a language learner. Then some proverbs. I wrote before that long, sequentially logical dialogues with a beginning and an end are really useful (when they have translation and audio) because they are closer to the reality than only a sequel of cut-out exchanges of words. I started watching the Norwegian movie Reprise. It turns out I understand much less from it than from other videos. Maybe it is a matter of getting used, but I'd be completely lost without subtitles. I really need to work my way through КУХНЯ and its Georgian dubbed version. Ideally i'd watch the series in the original which is also a language I'm learning, but given the lack of series in Georgian with subtitles (not even Georgian hardcoded subtitles are available) I make a better use of this series by watching it in Georgian with English subtitles. The interlinear texts aren't bad but it would be better to have the true subtitles interparsed in English-Russian instead of only literal translations. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 29 of 364 12 January 2015 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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I travelled to the countryside last weekend. It was a really nice trip, with rivers, waterfalls, views from the top of the mountain. No language studies at all, but then what I need the most is French video, and it wouldn't be practical to add some videos to the tablets. Maybe next time I will add some audiobooks of the classics and try to figure out what is happening. It turned out I spent most of my queit time playing Mahjongg Solitaire at the tablet. Funny how the game seems much more special now I know Chinese: I couldn't help mentally calling the numbers after the way they sound in Chinese (at times I would even say them loud to my wife when she was playing, to which she would stare blank - actually, even when calling out the numbers in Portuguese would be confusing enough apart from 1, 2, 3). I also observed the cardinal points and recognized them even in traditional characters which I don't study. It seems Chinese is now an inseparable part of my life and I don't think I can totally forget what I learned so far. It started out as low priority, even thought I consider that if I succeed to learn Chinese to a useful level one day, I will try my best to turn it into a strong career asset.
The changes in my routine can already be drew: I started watching videos from Estonian Language and Mind; then one post on grammar from The Estonian Language Blog, which is if not a good summary of Tuldava's textbook. Then the first lesson of Linguaphone Russian 1961 edition, for which I only had to look up 2 words; I believe when the lessons get longer I will have to start OCR'ing the pages, but I am confident my Russian will get better so that I will be able to learn the new words intensively and they won't be many by the final 20-30 lessons. All this to say that it took me less than 20 minutes to do all this, compared to 45 minutes with my former Estonian textbook alone. That means I will have more free time at least in this month and the next. Even though Learn Norwegian's lessons are long, they don't take me more than 20 minutes and they don't demand much effort. Even when the lessons turn into long texts, it won't be much trouble because after all I'm reading Norwegian from native material and am using this textbook mostly for consolidation of grammar and for active exercises of translating into TL, for which this textbook has been quite effective. So, I'm confident at doing a fine tune for my routine in the beginning of the year. Even last Friday, when I still was doing my last Assimil Perfectionnement Russe and Estnisch Lehrbuch lessons, I finished my activities two hours earlier and manage to do Duolingo, study Turkish and write more French (the film Le Boulet, which seems nice. All this is working as a confidence boost since my main issue was time. I know things will change when I get back to work but not that much so, because I kept my routine all yar long anyway. My main concern now is to reserve the extra time for active skills. It is ok with Norwegian and I exchanged a few sentences in Mandarin with yuhakko and might keep doing so, but there is still French, Georgian and German for which I have to get down on business at italki. Today's lesson of Learn Norwegian brought up important remarks on the 'instant' past of Norwegian: Norwegian uses the past tense even for things you just tasted, or saw, or felt. Example: Skal jeg gå rett frem? Nei, det var galt! = Should I go straight ahead? No, it's wrong (what you just said was wrong, as in, it already belongs to the past. Another example is Det var hyggelig å treffe deg = Nice to see you, it is said when you just met. Interesting lesson from Le Chinois par boules de neige: 今年夏天 和 去年夏天 ，本人 曾 分别在 大新进出口贸易公司 工作 本人 is how the person...humbly?!...speaks about themselves in the business CV letter, and 曾 is a past particle, seems to be more a feature of written language as well. I finished reading Jules Verne's 20.000 lieues sous les mers/80.000 კილომეტრი წყალქვეშ. It is a nice book and I recommend it as bilingual practice as it is available in so many languages. It did great for my Georgian. It is not such an easy book given all the specialized maritime vocabulary and the names of places and sea creatures, but the story flows effortlessly. It was a bit harder given the fact the Georgian one was abridged (it could have been worse if it were the other way round, for sure), so I hope my next book will be easier and I will also be more prepared for it. I tried reading Alice in Wonderland which I already have in Georgian but it is still above my head, so I will go for something contemporary, however "cheap" it may be. I will be glad to return to Jules Verne's books later, first I have to improve my Georgian reading skills so I can read faster and thus finish books faster. I was reading this one at 3 pages a day, but then the Georgian page seemed incredibly long. So, I started watching Кухня - actually სამზარეულო in the dubbed version. The series looks great indeed, and I'm glad that if I run out of episodes in Georgian I can still watch them in Russian. I watched episode 1 fully and I am sure it will help a lot with my Georgian. The dubbing is voice-over but at least each character gets its own voice, it's not like some films I saw where there is a voice that dubs everything. You still get to hear the original, though, but I'll get used to that, too, after all my Georgian needs that. It turned out I found some other videos that also have multiple-voice dubbing, which means all I have to do is get the subtitle in English and enjoy. I finished watching Les Femmes du 6ème étage and started watching Camille Redouble straight away, so that makes 10 minutes more in French films. None of my films/series now in French got subtitles, wich means I'm trying hard to catch up with the average I need for completing the 100 films/150 hours in the Super Challenge. Even 1 hour a day won't be enough for now, but I will try my best to complete the goal and to improve my listening comprehension because it still isn't high enough. The good news is that I can follow the story just fine even if I don't get all the lines. I already have a better time with films like Camille Redouble and Les Femmes du 6ème étage than with Le Boulet, for instance. A pause now on my studies for doing some groceries shopping. We were out the whole weekend with a birthday after we got back from the countryside, so no time for buying the weekly needs. When I am back I still have a lot of forum reading to do, and maybe another Turkish lesson. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 30 of 364 13 January 2015 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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It turns out The Estonian Language Blog has some exercises. That's more than I expected!
Mul on koer ja sul on kass. Ta on õpetaja ja tal on raamat ja pliiats. Õpilane on poiss. Nendel on maja. Mul on must pliiats. Sinul on kollane pliiats. Tal on sinine pliiats. Raamat on huvitav. Meil on vana raamat. Raamat on igav. Mul on väike ja ilus kass. Kass on must ja valge. Kas sul on koer? Mees ei ole rõõmus. Ta on kurb. Auto on sinine ja uus. Kas sinine auto on uus? Ei, sinine auto on vana. Kollane auto on uus. Kas raamat on huvitav? Raamat ei ole huvitav. Raamat on igav. Now for Learn Norwegian - Lesson 07: Du er ikke nordmenn, er du det? Nei, jeg er ikke det. Jeg er fra Pakistan. Du snakker urduda , gjør du ikke det? Jo, det gjør jeg. Det er mitt morsmål. Du snakker godt norsk. Synes du det? Ja, det synes jeg. Trives du her i landet? Ja, det gjør jeg, men jeg synes det er litt kaldt her. Jeg tror været vil bli bedre nå. Tror du det? Ja, det vil sikkert bli varmt igjen i morgen. Tror du det? Ja, kanskje det. Vi får håpe det. I've started my new novel in Georgian. It is easier than my previous one and the pages are the normal size, not A4 as it seemed to be the case with the Jules Verne's book I had. Only that the reader from this Georgian digital bookstore doesn't mark pages, only words. I will have to count pages manually and compare with the Brazilian Portuguese edition i'm following along. It was a good day for German listening, as In could follow Deutsch Direkt with no big problems. Not so good for French, though. Like I said, the past days I've only watched native French films without subtitles. Sometimes it's hard to understand the text, even if I can still follow the story. Today I had a hard time with Camille Redouble. Once I was done with my scheduled activities, I decided to finish watching Le Boulet. It is a nice comedy/action film. Towards the second half I was finding it easier, but I admit I lost long excerpts. Anyway, another one for the SC and the certainty that I need to keep training my listening comprehension in French. That is, I need the Super Challenge, not just as a task to accomplish. I really need this amount of video input so I can get my French back on track. Found time for another episode of Side om side. Almost done with this great series! It is easier to understand it than the film I'm currently watching (Reprise) because the sound quality is way higher. I'm watching it with Norwegian subtitles, and learning a lot from them, but if it weren't the case I'd still understand quite a bit from the dialogues. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4953 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 31 of 364 14 January 2015 at 8:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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very different from the standard language, to the extent that it makes me wonder if Estonian is a fragmented language like German or Norwegian. Maybe not much so and these differenced get 'zoomed in' for the purpose of dialectology, but it was interesting nonetheless.
I know this word from before, but it still astonishes me how счастливы gets pronounces sheslivy (Linguaphone Russian). By the way, it turns out I'm having issues with the select tool not being available at Adobe Reader, so I'm using Foxit Reader. I thought it only encompassed a Chinese pdf, but it also happens with Russian so it's an overall issue. Anyway, it didn't help using Foxit Reader. Nothing that a 'print' wouldn't solve, but today I still looked words up instead of OCR'in the text. 7 words on a page isn't that much trouble. Learn Norwegian - Lesson 08 Hvor mye er klokken? Det er ti på halv åtte. Når går bussen? Ti overr halv åtte. Da må jeg skynde meg. Jeg må vaske og stelle meg litt først. Og jeg bør ha med en matpakke med meg. Kan du hjelpe meg med det? En par brødskiver er nok. Jeg får vel gjøre det. Problemet med deg er at du går til sengs for sent på kvelden, så du er for trett om morgenen. Morgenstund har gull i munn, vet du. Det vet jeg, kjæresten min. Jeg skal forbedre meg, men det er ikke så lett. Har du matpakken ferdig? ja, her er den. Ha en god dag. Ha det. This lesson was awfully long. Fortunately, I didn't find the section on clocks and time a nuisance as it is the case. That shows my level is already a bit more advanced and I can reason how to say some of the hour-minute combinations on my own. The paragraph above was particularly challenging, but it asker for words and expressions not used so far. Jeg sitter og ser filmen 'Reprise (2006)'. Den handler om to forfattere som er venner. En av dem er blitt psykotisk og har vært noen måneder på psykiatrisk sykehuset. Den andre klarte ikke å ha romanene sine publisert, men etter at vennen sin kom tilbake fra sykehuset, sendte han en ny roman på forlagshuset og den enne ble mottat. Det er interessant å lese om livet til forfatterne og bokmarketet, selv om det er naturlig fiksjon. De er tjuetre år gammel, begge to. Jeg lurer på at det er mulig å skrive noe nyskapende roman etter å ha fylt 30. (denne notaten her er også på italki. It turns out I understand much more today from the film I mentioned above than in the previous times, that's encouraging. Also better at the film Camille Redouble. Maybe the sound quality is better today, don't know. I'm tempted to say it was the best Georgian reading day so far. A contemporary story and somewhat simpler language helped me to tackle the pages in only 20 minutes and in a mood that would take a few more pages. We'll see in the upcoming days if I will manage to read even faster and more each day, In German, I've also reached a stage in parallel reading where I resort less and less to the L1 text (currently French). I remember this time in Norwegian, though I can't really compare because I was reading fiction in Norwegian and the non-fiction vocabulary in German is actually the hardest compared to the Romance languages and even to Norwegian. It was also a good day for Russian reading. I had a little less effort and thus a little more patience to read some paragraphs in parallel instead of all-L2 then L1. I had totally forgotten about Duolingo but it's back today. Did 1 1/2 chapter then stopped for more Le trône de fer. It seems so much easier to understand than the original films in French i'm watching, though I am all for the films. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4559 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 32 of 364 14 January 2015 at 9:25pm | IP Logged | ||
I had to look up like half of the terms I used in that second sentence :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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