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What Expug is doing in 2015 (TAC n more) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5134 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 49 of 364 27 January 2015 at 1:18am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I too come from northern Italy and like you I use sedia almost exclusively, but I don’t find the word seggiola at all weird!
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| 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 50 of 364 27 January 2015 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@Emme i tristano: grazie mille per l'aiuto! Ho capito gli spegazioni e la differenza tra le forme.
I forgot to mention here: last weekend I took a look at some of the translated books I have for Estonian...and I figured out I couldn't understand a word! The sentences seemed totally alien to me, as if I had never studied the language. Yet I have a good basic level, maybe in the A2's. What does that demonstrate? That learning a non-transparent language involves increasing its transparency gradatively. When I look at a Georgian text and understand 50% of it, I shouldn't be frustrated that I still can't read it, but rather thankful because I've already learned a good deal of words. So, I should lower my expectations with Estonian even if I feel my studies are going faster than with the other non-transparent ones I started. Vocabulary needs time to sink in, after all. Learn Norwegian - Lesson 17 Det er dyrt å leve i Norge i dag, dyrer enn i mange andre land. Alle priser går litt opp hvert år. Denne hvite skjorten jeg har på, koster nå 150 kroner, men i 1980 kostet den kansje 80 kroner. Dette sorte beltet som du ser her, jmå eg betale 90 kroner for i dag. Men for noen år siden var prisene bare det halve. Når foreldrene mine snakker om prisene i gamle dager, lyder det som et eventyr. Men en skal huske at på den tiden var lønningene lave også. Før krigen tjente folk bare ca. tre til fem tusen kroner i året, og en bil kostet omtrent det samme. Men levestandarden var mye lavere enn den er i dag. Meget få mennesker hadde råd til å kjøpe bil. Så kansje vi ikke skal klage allikevel. Alt har sin pris. This was the last exercise and I didn't do that bad, in spite of making the usual mistake of using 'Det' for replacing everything, even when the referred noun was masculine. I really like this textbook and I'm certain it has a special place fairly on top of all other ones you can see for Norwegian. Both French and Norwegian readings today were marked by the looking up of important words. As for continuing Angels and Demons in Chinese, it is really practical. I read two chapters and the beginning of chapter 4 and I found the reading both interesting and easy. I expect to learn a lot from it, as I'm approaching a more appropriate percentage of vocabulary for a comfortable read. I'm keeping the 3 pages a day of the previous book even if I feel I could do more without burnout, the reason being I'm going to read much more from the textbook I'm currently using. I'm still watching the making og Brødrene Dal og mysteriet om Karl XIIs gamasjer, and now I'm having more fun. It served as both a teaser and a warm-up for the actual episodes. I'm becoming familiarized with the context. Today I understood more than in the previous two days. For example, when one person is speaking alone to the camera, I can have a good grasp of what is being said. I believe this is an important step into my progress in Norwegian. I would indeed be benefitting from more Norwegian listening a day, and that's what I am sort of doing, since I'm also L-Ring Learn Norwegian's dialogues and texts. There there is also the issue of 'flow': my sections of native film/TV are limited to 10 minutes. It does make sense to stay longer and expect to understand more after you feel you are 'attached' to the video (or to the book as well). But then what's the point? I shouldn't be too dependent in the sense of only being able to understand well after, let's say, 10 minutes. If that's the case I will always miss the beginning of a film till I tune in, and will miss whole short clips at Youtube. I know that this is somehow what happens with French films, for instance, but always looking for longer excerpts may not be the way to deal with it. It's better to deal with varied lengths of films as to force yourself to tune in as soon as possible, risking not understanding anything at all. After all, you don't usually have to wait for a 'tune in' time in your native language, not if you do pay attention from the beginning, and that's the ultimate goal to attempted, even if asymptotically. So, it turned out it was a shorter lesson from Practical Chinese for Official Functions. The dialogues were once again helpful and appropriate. They were shorter. The reading passage was shorter, too, but on the Zodiac. That is, the dialogues cover daily life on business while the reading passage covers more ancient cultural themes. It doesn't make much sense or synergy, so I'm not paying much attention to the texts anyway, and am reading them nearly extensively. Finally a better day with reading German. It was surprisingly fast, too, almost the speed of Norwegian, even though I have to look at the French original as well in the case of German. I was more concentrated and could read longer without resorting to French. I'm still far from my goal but then maybe I will see some sort of epiphany. Maybe it's time to try some news podcasts. I think the podcast format is important at some stage when studying a language, even though I never used podcasts for French and only pod101 for Norwegian (which did help a lot). I knew Bella Martha's story was familiar and the fact that Paolo Conte's Via con Me is also on the soundtrack finally ringed a bell: The movie 'No Reservations' is an adaptation from it (though I'm sure someone who watched both and didn't know about the production year of each would assume the Hollywoodean came first). The dialogues today sounded so clear today, maybe because it was mostly the Italian character talking in German (yes, Italian accents can be easier in some languages other than English). Strange how Martha adresses the Italian assistent as 'du', maybe because they're co-workers? Today was a particularly busy day and I realized I (re)started doing some tasks with a distracted mind. This so cannot happen. I should remind myself constantly that I need to pay full attention to what I'm doing if I want to consciously activate some words. At least I could do this for some sentences in Georgian, even if in longer, descriptive paragraphs I still tend to read in L2 at once before checking the translation. It is working better with German now, as I mentioned above, so maybe the day will come for Georgian and Russian, too. Actually it's working fine with Chinese thanks to Pera-pera, which means that a sort of a pop-up dictionary would be great for the other languages, too. Not available for German or Russian, though. I just read about Foxlingo and gtranslate, anyone has ever used those? Anyway, I read mostly from ebooks, so a Firefox add-on wouldn't help much, except in the case of shorter articles, which I can just copy-paste at GoogleT. 19 lessons of Duolingo. Each one has an average of 17 sentences, usually more. That makes at least 323 type-and-enter, and over three quarters of an hour. At least I'm learning, and I want to put this knowledge to use. Luckily no burnout, so I can still handle a lesson of Turkish. This lesson is about telling the time, and I find it too complicated to understand from a booklet. Nå vil jeg øve litt. Jeg er bekymret for tørken her i Brasil. Det har ikke regnet mye i fjor, og vannreservoarene er tome. For den første gang blir det tørken i en del av Brasil hvor det har alltid regnet så mye og hvor sukerrør og kaffe ble dyrket siden kolonitiden. Grunnet av tørken er ikke naturen eller guddommelige krefter, men mangel av investeringer i vannresusrser, intensiv bruk av vann ved jordbruksindustri og minerasjon og avskoging i den Amazonasregnskogen. Det er på grunn av den Amazonasregnskogen at det regner mye i sor-øst Brasil, I motsetning til Australia og Namibia som ligger på samme breddegrad. Jeg håper vi slutter å gjøre feil med behandling av vår vannressurser. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3643 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 51 of 364 28 January 2015 at 11:58am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I must disagree here. Although I think it's definitely necessary to learn how to cope with shorter things (be they video or sound only), I think there is a definite benefit from listening to longer things. The thing that improved my oral comprehension in French the most wasn't working intensively on shorter extracts such as songs or clips from comedy sketches, nor watching YouTube videos, but attending French lectures. There I would be listening to non-stop French for maybe three hours at a time, and this really helped my comprehension across the board, even for things that would be seemingly unrelated, such as youtube videos. Of course, this also has something to do with the fact that I went to a lot of French lectures during my time in France (averaging around 14-15 hours per week), and this was very much an intensive activity, where I would be writing down almost everything that the teachers were saying. After that experience, though, I would say that working intensively on listening for a period of 1-2 hours really helps push along listening comprehension much better than shorter extracts, not only because you get into the flow of the text, but also because it gives your brain a lot more time to get used to the language. It improved my ability to hear and spell words I did not know and had never seen written. I also listened semi-intensively to a lot of Swedish last summer, taking notes on words I didn't recognise (which were plentiful), and now I don't really have any difficulty identifying different words and sounds in Swedish although my vocabulary is still pitifully low and I can't reproduce these sounds. So although the process is quite laborious, I think doing it even just a few times would really help with understanding both longer and shorter things. Although I used documentaries and TV programs for Swedish, it is probably better to use a lecture, as it feels more worthwhile to be taking notes on a lecture on a topic you're interested in than on a TV program.
Have you ever used Readlang? I started using it fairly recently, but it allows you to import certain ebook formats (I know it allows epub, I am not sure which other formats it accepts). Hope that it is useful for you, I've found it very helpful. 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 52 of 364 28 January 2015 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@Elenia: it doesn't have to be either or. Check this thread to have an idea of what I have in mind. At my current level of French, listening to a university lecture wouldn't bring me any considerable learning benefits other than plainly learning about the content being taught. That is, the fact the lecture is in French changes nothing since I'm already used enough to listening to non-spontaneous text in French. And this is usually the case with most languages. Textbooks prepare you well for such texts, and when the language shares a common source for more academic vocabulary, then all is even easier. Now, when it comes to spontaneous text, a lot more training is required to understand when a French-speaker all of a sudden talks to you about something you're supposed to be familiar with - it can be a remark on the weather, pointing to some scene, a conversation opener and so it goes.It is a much more difficult skill to learn than listening to a lecture and listening to a lecture won't help that much with it either. What may help is watching popular contemporary native films and even those short youtube videos, maybe even ones with fun stuff, that natives watch at a glance and understand at a glance, too. I may benefit from a longer exposure to spontaneous speech indeed, that is, by watching films for a longer time, but the skill I believe I need to train now is how to 'tune in' faster so I can avoid missing the first 10 minutes of every conversation, because that is not what fluently is like. Again, that is not my case but my point is that we are speaking of a specific training here that can't be accomplished with massively watching university lectures or the news.
This is for French, but in the case of weaker languages I'm constantly trying to find a compromise between flow and burnout. If I still don't have enough vocabulary to actually understand the text/video without assistance, reading several pages won't really bring in a flow but rather make me awfully tired. As for Readlang, I know about it and its similar websites, but I have such a routine that I try to avoid material that has to be previously prepared for use. I'd rather just paste everything at Google when strictly necessary (after OCRing it if that's the case) or use a parallel text on my own, by splitting windows. =========== Ok, it turns out Estonian has become a sort of a dabbling language. The amount of study I do each day - 1 short video studied intensively from Estonian Language and Mind and one blog post from Estonian Blog seems to be insufficient so far to allow me for more audacious moves in the language. On the other hand, taking a monolingual textbook (or a Russian-based one, for that matter) would still be a stretch. I will keep monitoring the next days for whether I'm actually learning words in an appropriate pace. I should bear in mind there are still the Goethe-Verlag exercises which will allow me for activating much from my passive vocabulary. Does anyone know of an Estonian podcast? The Linguaphone Russian lesson is also short, but this is more related to its difficulty, because after all it's almost 3 pages of native material (the same way the Learn Norwegian lessons are over 10-page long and yet easy to follow entirely in Norwegian). What I said about Estonian resources last year may not be so true, I mean, there are very good textbooks but the learning curve is also steep, to the extent that when I am done with the textbooks available in English I still won't have consolidated the necessary vocabulary or internalized the grammar. I learned the grammar, that's it, but I can't use it yet. I'm not sure it's reviewing that I need at the moment because I will be exposed to the same words from the textbooks, so maybe I will wait for Estonian Language and Mind to finish and then try taking short texts. Learn Norwegian's lesson 18 was particularly easy. It helps that there is a glossary where I can easily find the new words, even for the poems, that are quite interesting but tend to use obscure vocabulary. I'm happy about my level of understanding the grammatical explanations. That means I won't have trouble checking a monolingual grammar when necessary (or that website Ogrim linked here, for that matter). Today I read the best explanation on the usage of skal, vil og kommer til å ever. In Norwegian. And I hope I won't mix skal x vil anymore, and stick to kommer til å when I want to be safe. Then there is the great page on how to express previous and upcoming periods of time: for 2 månede siden <- forrige måned <- denne måneden -> neste måneden -> om 2 måneder; i forfjor <- i fjor <- i år -> neste år -> om 2 år. This list is really important for learning the usage of prepositions and articles in these time expressions (and they do vary when dealing with years, months, seasons etc). Now I'm done reading what I consider the most important French book of the decade, or of this century: Le capital au XXIè siècle, by Thomas Piketty. I should be somehow ashamed of reading a book that confirms my ideas and beliefs, but on the other hand it is assuring to see demonstrated with data and facts what I've always intuited. Will go for spirituality this time, as I'm reading enough of economics and politics in German-French. By the way, today is the day of solving recurring doubts: I finally confifmed when to pronounce the s in tous (i.e. regardless of liaison matters). It is a day of completions. I've also finished the first volume, Mørketid, of a series. I won't read the following ones. That's what you get for enjoying the free e-book offers at the online Norwegian bookstores. Now i'm back to parallel reading again, so as to fill some gaps in my vocabulary. I will take the only one available at Farkas Translations, The Hound of the Baskervilles. It is hard to get hold even of the world classics in Norwegian. Fortunately I still have several other free ebooks awaiting, but when the time comes to buy again I will be strict. Anyway, I think I can already read the Norwegian classics and not become confused about spelling or grammar, and these are widly available. Any recommendations on what to read first and where to get them? i'm going to read Hunden fra Baskerville alongside with Spanish instead of the original English, 1) because it is boring to read in English, 2) because I will learn some Spanish and 3) because I don't need a translation that badly after all. It took a little longer than I expected to read a few pages today, but I was busy with preparing the files. Anyway, I was busy wtih deciding what to read next in French, too, to the extent that I'm one hour behind in the schedule. I started watching the actual episodes of Brødrene Dal and it turns out they have hardcoded Norwegian subtitles. Not bad! That's what I was in need of. I will keep working on what I had planned and will save up some disk space when it's over. It is a funny series. A really good day of reading in Georgian. Really encouraging, I just have to keep going. I read whole paragraphs before resorting to Portuguese and even from the longer ones I already have an idea of what is going on. The Georgian series and the Russian series and book suffered from my need to accelerate things and even the Singaporean series did to some extent. Well, at least I can see a pattern now, that it is not the same language that gets thwarted every day, since yesterday was a good day for Russian. Time for Кухня/სამზარეულო ! Watched a new episode today, finally. I still wish there was no Russian audio behind, but I'm slowly getting better at decyphering what's being said in Georgian and associating it with meaning. Now I only have another episode with English subs left, and then we'll see how hard it will get to follow the Georgian audio with Russian subtitles translated word-by-word into English. Funny how working on Duolingo Italian sentences while watching Le Trône de Fer helps me parse audio in two languages simultaneously - and being at the last Rencontre Francophone with 4 tables full of people talking French simultaneously also helped with simultaneous listening. Not an ideal situation for language learning, of course, but it is closer to our natural listening in our native environment. The good thing is that I'm also finding time for some reading late in the evening, even if only a few pages. I'm used very tired, it's true, but the mere fact that lately I'm not tired enough to be unable to read anything should be celebrated. After all, part of my goals is to have time to read non-language related stuff as well, or something from other hobbies. I just got the suggestion of the book Para ler como um escritor, the Brazilian translation, by Francine Prose, and while I admit I did search for the German version, I'd be happy with finishing a book in Portuguese. Time for Turkish. Friday is pazartesi, in Georgian it's პარასკევი (parask'evi), almost a transliteration of greek Παρασκευή. Now, how did Turkish get this metathesis? Btw, today's explanation sheet is missing in my book, so I'm wondering how geliyorsunuz becomes gelmiyoursunuz. Is it really so subtle, just an inserted m-phoneme right after the radical? That would be the trickiest negative I've dealt with so far. 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 53 of 364 28 January 2015 at 10:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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| 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 54 of 364 29 January 2015 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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@vonPeterhof: my bad. I didn't notice it was Monday. Actually it is similar to Portuguese then, as we say segunda-feira, terça-feira etc.
====================== Today's Linguaphone Russian started with the common (for older textbooks) lesson about the post office. Not one I'd care much about. Learn Norwegian's lesson 19 was pretty straightforward, on preterites. Another good day for Georgian so far. Both reading and watching without subtitles. I managed to pay more attention today and understood a bit more. I might still learn much more from სამზარეულო, though I didn't pay attention yesterday as to how much I was understanding. Anyway, I hope I can start recognizing some patterns of some irregular verbs from the novel while watching the series, because that way I may understand more and more from the latter. Finished the 'easy' exercises for German, from Goethe-Verlag. I won't proceed to the Advanced ones right now, will take a break and do Italian instead, after all there's a trip awaiting, and my active vocabulary for Italian might be still smaller than German, especially regarding tourist stuff. It will be a bit like doing Duolingo bu the content is different, and those texts have some fixed tourist phrases. Maybe I can do 5 in a day in Italian, then I will be done by the time I'll have to pick another Estonian resource. See, when learning several languages the minimal tasks may have to be coordinated. Today I finished my tasks the earliest of all. Hope I haven't missed anything. Enough time for watching Le Trône de Fer separately from doing Duolingo, though I can't help at least taking a look while the series is going slow. Same happens with Poor Nastya and Divergent in Russian. Most important of all: I definitely can listen to an hour of French each day and that will allow me to complete the 150 hours of the SC this year; it is also helping my French because I'm listening in different contexts, with and without external noise, dubbed or native material. I'm not enjoying the film Un printemps à Paris that much and the main character seems to mumble all the time, but I've seen some progress since I restarted watching native films unsubbed and I really have to keep working on it. I'm finally past the mark where the placement test left me in Duolingo. At least it's much less confusing now. I can stop in the middle of a chapter and know where to resume from. And I'm doing travelling and directions, so all the better. How often do people use pullman to mean bus?. Today I learned about the roots and the infinitive of the Turkish verbs. I really love this agglutination! Another episode of სამზარეულო, unfortunately the last one with English subtitles. Today's subtitles were even incomplete, so in the end I realized how it would be to work with Russian + literal English above, and I didn't like the experience. It only adds more opacity to the game, as I have to listen to the Georgian and then figure out the Russian with the help of the literal English translation, while previously I'd quickly read the English before even listening to the Georgian. Well, next time I will try to throw everything at Google Translator first, but it still isn't the same as a properly made translation. And I was learning so much from today's episode, I was starting to internalize some Georgian sentences, I was even processing some longer ones. These are the hardships of learning a rare language. Time for some practice: －快点儿！ 你要迟到了！ －怎么急？我今天不上课！ －是真的吗？那你姐姐怎么那么早走出？ －他不是学校去， 是商场去 －什么？啊呀！这么傻瓜的孩子！所有时间都 要去购物，不做功课，不帮忙家务。我马上就 给她打电话。 －妈，等一下！我回想她没带手机了！ －糟糕！你有他的一个女朋友的电话号码吗？ －有， 就是二零四五。。。五三零九。 －谢谢你，孩子。 -Hurry up! You will be late! -Why hurry? I don't have classes today. - Really?Then why did your sister leave so early? -She didn't go to school, she went shopping at the mall. -What? Argh! What a silly kid! She wants to go shopping all the time, won't do her homework, won't help with the house chores either. I'm going to call her right now. - Wait, mom! I reckon she didn't bring her cellphone. - Oh no! Do you have the number of a friend of hers? - I do, it's two zero four five...five three zero nine. - Thank you, child. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6943 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 55 of 364 30 January 2015 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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See what you miss when you don't study Azeri, Expugnator? ;-)
Turkish verbs are quite interesting in how tense, aspect and mood are represented. The agglutination turns up again and again, and it's not so much the mechanical addition of suffixes that's hard as much as representing various shades of meaning using just suffixes rather than adverbs, prepositions, word order or different verbs. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5134 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 56 of 364 03 February 2015 at 11:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's a question about Italian, isn't it? In Italian “autobus” (Italian pronunciation!), “pullman” and “corriera” are almost synonymous and their use depends on who you are and where you live. Personally, I use “autobus” for inner-city public transport; “corriera” for public transport on longer journeys (up to a few hundred km); and “pullman” or “corriera” for charted journeys such as school trips etc. But I’ve just had a look at these discussions http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=757047 http://www.achyra.org/cruscate/viewtopic.php?p=14672#14672 and it’s clear that opinions vary even among native speakers: some people find “corriera” obsolete (I do not, and neither do other people who took part in those discussions and who said they come from other areas of Northern Italy), in some areas they only use “pullman” etc. You need to be able to understand them all, I’m afraid, and use the one that people around you prefer. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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