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What Expug is doing in 2015 (TAC n more) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4954 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 177 of 364 22 May 2015 at 11:18pm | IP Logged |
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@daegga, you're right, it's the other one you suggested. Thank you for telling me about the film, I'll try to find it.
I didn't know that abielu was formed from abi = help and elu = life, so a marriage is a life help. A spouse is an abikaas, a 'help along'. This is more than romantic, this is about true love. I like it that the exercises's enunciate are written in both Estonian and German. This alone helps learn a lot, as a parallel reading. Today's lesson was a long one once again, took me 50 minutes (or even a full hour, considering I arrived 10 minutes earlier than usual). At least some shorter ones are coming, and I'm learning to avoid some exercises like filling in a spreadsheet with partitive and genitive plural forms. The first Georgian story suggested by iguanamon has 4828 words. I'm counting 12 pages for the SC. This is gonna WORK! Thanks to the audio, I'm paying more attention to how the sentences are built than if it was just parallel reading. I'm also getting used to the sound of the language and this might help me understand other stuff better, like series. I'm doing only 400 characters a day, so I listened to around 3'30" minutes today out of 35'+. It will be effective learning and won't take much of my time which has been scarce lately. Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: A Practical Guide has simplified followed by traditional. This will be my first systematic exposition to traditional. I really should take the most out of this book, it's a gem. I'm starting to promise to myself I will take my time and avoid coming up with situations such as 'at least 10 pages each day' or 'one chapter each day', because it hindered a bit my use of this series for German already. Just now something came to my mind: I'll be missing the 1 page I was reading from China in kleinen Geschichten and that may affect my Super Challenge stats. I will have to come up with something because I will be spending a good pair of months on Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar. So I started Drei Männer im Schnee. It seems already easier than the non-fiction. Not exactly in terms of vocabulary, but concerning the effort I have to make to understand. The facts are simpler, that's it. I'm counting the same 10 pages for French as the 10 I read in German because the French pages have an awfully big font type. Busy with some repetitive tasks, I decided to further watch Fais pas ci, fais pas ça while working on them. Not enough to finish two episodes, but almost there. Still nothing on Turkmen, Italian, not finished reading the forum or any other activities. Let's hope for a better week with optimization of Estonian time, for instance. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4954 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 178 of 364 25 May 2015 at 11:44pm | IP Logged |
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The weekend was productive if not quantitatively at least qualitatively. I put an end to the forum's passive and now only the team challenges are missing. I watched over an hour of French video and read the same couple of pages in Russian as usual, which finally got a little bit easier, but far from enough to allow me to read without a translation. I did a trick for my Super Challenge's spreadsheet I should have thought of earlier. The online Excel doesn't allow for formatting hours continually: everytime it completes 24 hours it goes 00:00:00 again. So I used to download the spreadsheet and open it on local Excel whenever I wanted to know the absolute stats. Then yesterday I had the idea of just reuploading the local version to Onedrive, and it worked. I was afraid I could lose any formatting or data while replacing it, and it worked. Now I can check my video stats in real time. Less than 15 hours for completing the French 100 films.
Today's video in Papiamento was an interview with a 8-y.o. boy! It was quite interesting to listen to an authentic dialogue in Papiamento, instead of just plain news. There aren't textbooks with audio and dialogues for Papiamento so it's perhaps the first spontaneous dialogue I've listened to. And I understand the dialogue just fine, so I felt quite happy about it. Never compliment too early, not even mentally. I was so satisfied that Happy Journey Across China's videos were loading pretty fast without any trouble. The on Friday I couldn't get past 2' at the video. I ended up watching it in the evening. Today I couldn't start it all. Will see if I have time in the evening again. A short Estonian lesson, easy to understand. I just didn't finish it earlier because I had some issues to deal with. Hope the trend persists. A technique I use for remembering where I stopped when reading from a long online text (like subtitles I'm just reading or for example the Georgian story): I paste it on a doc file and delete as I read. Today's reading was easier than the first one, and I expect it to only get better. I finished the hard book Det store nashornet, so back to plain bokmål again. I was supposed to start L-Ring Hodejegerne, but I couldn't find the files, maybe I forgot to copy from my home pc. I was in doubt whether to start with another book because I was so eager for L-ring Norwegian. I picked another audiobook which I only had the Portuguese translation for, and I was unsure if I could listen to Norwegian, read in Portuguese and count it as a Norwegian book instead of film, can I?. I even considered buying that one book but then I thought it's too much money and I should buy novels that didn't get translated instead, because audiobooks are usually easy to find and I could theoretically do this Norwegian audio + translation as often as possible. In the end, I started Hodejegerne without audio, but with all this I lost half an hour, which was all the time I had saved in the morning. Anyway, I plan to start playing the audio this evening and then tomorrow I will continue with audio. I'm placing high expectations on this to help me move on with my Norwegian which has been neglected early and so I still have my update to 'speaks' as pending. Learning so much new stuff at Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar. For example, I didn't know that in Taiwan syllables retain their original tones. I also didn't know the rules for when the syllables lose to the neutral tones in northern Mandarin, and they are related to whether the second character brings new meaning to the first or not. Makes a lot of sense. German reading still no piece of cake. Sometimes I think it's harder than Georgian, because I know the story in Georgian. Will keep working to fill in the gaps. i'm reading the translation in French, which means I'm reading 3 books in French daily, about 40 pages. And this when I have already completed my 50 book units months ago and have over 7k pages logged for the SC. If I keep the rhythm I can even aim for 10k, but this is far from being a goal given that this is my strongest skill of the whole SC as well, so I should worry about languages that are still weak instead. Funny thing happened in Bednaya Nastya, they changed the actor that was playing Nikita. Feels so weird! An hilarious episode at Fais pas ci, fais pas ça when a Ukranian aupair arrives. I had only a few minutes left and I preferred to work on a course I have to do for work. After reading some pages, I opened the Turkmen Manual but time was only enough for me to read the first of the two pages with cultural info that open each chapter. I like those texts because they allow me to learn quite a bit about the country even if I'm not going to study the language in depth now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4954 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 179 of 364 26 May 2015 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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Once again I couldn't watch the videos from CCTV. I've been trying again since last evening but no luck. Nothing loads and the videos just freezes pointing to 1:40.
The lessons at Lehrbuch der estnischen Sprache now have long dialogues, but what's better about it, I can follow the Estonian just fine while looking at the German translation as well, and seldom have to translate words. This means I may not be that close from being able to do some parallel reading later. The reader at citybooks reads like a machine gun. Is it a Georgian trend? The same happened with Radio Tavisufleba. So I started LR-ing Norwegian again! This is getting addictive. Even if I didn't have a translation, it's already easier to understand the text when it is read, because you know instantly when each of the sentence's terms end and don't have to work much on syntactical relations. You know if a verb refers to a preceding noun as a relative clause or if it is the subject of the main clause, for instance. The reading is quite fast and the reader seems the same as the one I've heard in Jostein Gaarder's books. I'm really excited about this LRing and what it can do for my Norwegian. The story at Hodejegerne itself is also quite addictive so far. Short dialogues, a vocabulary that is somewhat not so formal and slightly slangish. Still not what I'd need to understand Helt Perfekt perfekt, but it is a work in progress now. I wasn't making the most ouf of my reading the past books, and now I'm happy that I'm giving Norwegian the importance it deserves again. Regarding Helt Perfekt, the mumbling seems to be slowly dissipating. Sometimes I can already understand the sounds but not the meaning yet, i.e. I don't understand it fast enough to be able to process the meaning. It's a work in progress. Il y a eu une scène marrante dans le film 'Le Hérisson'. La concièrge est allé rendre visite chez le nouveau voisin japonais. Elle lui a demandé sur les toilettes et s'y est dirigé. Lorsque elle s'est assise sur la toilette, une chanson classique a été declenchée. La pauvre dame ne savait quoi faire, elle s'est levée et s'assise à nouveau et a chaque foi la musique s'arreta ou se déclencha immédiatement. For a change, I'm going to say how easy my Russian readings are becoming. Today I could understand quite a bit of the story at Insurgent before turning to the translation. The whole 'schedule' has become quite comfortable, no more struggle as I seem to have reached an intermediate level in all languages. Only Chinese is still the most difficult for reading, but this has more to do with the script. I won't claim I understand everything at Fais pas ci, fais pas ça but I can follow the story quite well and even when something goes unexplained or mumbled I figure it out later. I keep learning, for example, I start to understand on the background what I previously only understood when paying full attention. I'm quite addicted to the characters' stories by the way. Once I finish the SC I will have to find some time at my schedule, probably the weekends, for watching one episode now and then. It is not a burden at all. I'm still waiting for the episodes of Le trône de fer in VF, though, so I will have to take a break from Fais pas ci, fais pas ça while catching up. More Turkmen. This is serving mostly as a warm-up for my definitive Turkic language which is probably going to be Turkish, though I'm also looking forward to Uzbek's challenge period as it has lots of useful resources. Not enough time for finishing the Italian lesson, though at least I started it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4954 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 180 of 364 27 May 2015 at 11:54pm | IP Logged |
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Still no Happy Journey Across China. It is a specific type of player that the site loads embeddedly for these final videos that is causing trouble. Anyone cares to take a look and see if it works for you? I have the option of doing Happy Chinese Season 2, but this one has no English subtitles. I also managed to find through Google the archives of the previous Happy Journey Across China, so maybe that's an option. Will try tomorrow. I'm really missing this extra exercise for Chinese.
L-Ring Georgian is becoming motivating and comfortable. I can't claim to perceive and analize all sentences, not the longer paragraphs at least, but I feel I'm learning quite a bit. Turkmen is right-branched, at least when it comes to the genitive case. No time for Italian again, though I chose to work on my pending course before doing Turkmen. Also some threads left unread. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4954 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 181 of 364 29 May 2015 at 12:38am | IP Logged |
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'm orphan of CCTV series for the moment. I tried the archives but it's also old videos with old players (they use even Real Audio!) that, when they actually load, they do it slower than the current videos used to.
The start of my schedule got delayed by a series of promotional flights Porto Alegre - Munich for only US$100. Porto Alegre is far away from here and I can't flight in November, but now I'm excited, maybe there will be other promotional offers for my city as well. Today I read all the initial sentences at LES' lesson without looking up a single Estonian word. I'm happy the L-Ring of the Georgian texts isn't take me much more time than usual, not even for opening all the parallel windows and the sound files. Today I had a sequence of dialogues so I could follow the text quickly, sometimes only Georgian. Today's Norwegian L-R was a bit less fun and a bit longer, with interruptions. I bet it is due to many details on people and place's names which I should pay attention to in order to follow the story. Mandarin reading consisted of short chapters at Angels and Demons. I'm still lagging behind my goals of accomplishing a half challenge, as I was supposed to be reading 4 pages a day and I only read three a day from this book. I'm still thnking about what to do in addition, no idea yet. I just don't want another book, something online is probably better. At Modern Mandarin Chinese: a Practical Grammar I learned something essential for going shopping in China: discounts are expressed as % of the normal price, not as the percent that is removed from the price. 8 ba1 zhe2 = 80% of original price or 20% off. FInally I have something to say about the Chinese series. I don't know if it's because I'm less tired because I'm not watching the other program anymore, but today I could concentrate more at the Singaporean series and thus realized I understand a lot. I also know the vast majority of characters being used. Hope in the next series I will be able to notice a higher level of comprehension. Season 02 of Fais pas ci, fais pas ça has long episodes. This comes in handy for this week and the next, while I'm playing the final hours of my French Super Challenge, Afterwards I will continue watching French every day, will just get back to the minimum 10 minutes, with films instead of series, so I will probably put it on standby. I had enough time to do the repetitive tasks in advance, which means I will have a little more time for catching up with the forum today and tomorrow as well. I spent the extra time mostly reading the forum, and I somehow regret to keep reading a long topic day after day, one that has little to do with how I work. At least I recovered my always-open tabs and read a little more from the site with Chinese stories, 1 more page to the SC. Still found time for Turkmen. I start to suspect some verbal features are unique to the language: "Turkmen forms the negative of the present-past tense (no affirmative form exists) by adding a contraction of a verbal form combined with personal suffixes followed by a negating element". I could also finish la ventesima lezione from Perfectionnement Italien, which I had started a couple of days ago. I took a look at my collection of classics in Estonian again, and now I can recognize a good deal of words on a page, much different from a few months ago. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4954 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 182 of 364 29 May 2015 at 11:32pm | IP Logged |
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The fact I started reading a little bit more Mandarin yesterday seems to have motivated me or worked as a warm-up. I read quickly today from Angels and Demons and understood more than usual.
I only know figured out there is a synopsis text file at each episode of Helt Perfekt. That would bring me more reading practice as well as an idea of what is going on, though I still manage to have an idea of what's going on anyway. Anyway, I already noticed a significant increase in comprehension of about 20 percentage points when compared to last week before L/Ring, for instance. The strategy of listening in a more relaxed way is working with Norwegian the same way it did for English, French and Papiamento (which means I should try to do this for Mandarin?). Fenally got 'Famille Bélier'. It will obviously get to cut in line through the other scheduled films. I even watched 'Le Hérisson' to the end without realizing there were more than 20 minutes left (and I do 10 min a day), because I wanted to start it asap. Maybe in the end I'm going to watch a little at the weekend, at home, with subtitles in Portuguese so my wife gets to watch it along. Well, that's a good idea after all. Oh, the reassuring words you may find on grammar books: "In mainland China, in informal speech, gè can be used as the classifier for almost any noun, even those with an established classifier. This phenomenon is sometimes referred to as gè huà ‘ge-ization." The German novel I'm reading is boring. About rich people in a luxurious hotel. I couldn't care less. Maybe that's why I'm not understanding that much. Currently I'm understanding more from Georgian or Russian novels than from this one. Maybe I should actually try daegga's suggestion next. Maybe I need to start doing LR-ing for German. It's a fact that I retain the most vocabulary at this combo text in L2 with translation in L1 + audio in L2. And just now I checked I'm six pages away from reaching my half-challenge in German books. I'm far from reaching my goal of being able to read in German comfortably, though. I think the syntax, rather than the vocabulary, still causes me a lot of trouble. I also finished watching Lammbock. Now should come another film with subtitles in German. Should find another film with German subtitles. Probably Das Adlon - eine Familien Saga, though I only found German subtitles so far, not English. Will try to find some films during the weekend. The Norwegian Challenge is a work in progress. I saved it as a draft and plan to write a couple more paragraphs this weekend. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4954 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 183 of 364 01 June 2015 at 11:40pm | IP Logged |
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It was a nice weekend, I went out with friends and still managed to do more than usual for the SC. I wrote La Famille Bélier with my wife and Portuguese subtitles. I really enjoyed this film and so did she. Michel Sardou reminds me a lot of Roberto Carlos and other singers considered 'música brega' here. I could have understood the film without the subtitles, probably I'd just need earphones for the most difficult parts. I also read 6 pages of Russian instead of the usual 2 and watched the short series 'Over Hekken', a spin-off from 'Side om side'.
Tolkien in Georgian (The Hobbit). What more do I have to say? I've been reluctant to anything with middle-age environment (so Middle Earth also fits this), but maybe it is the opportunity that I had been missing so far. This week is going to be a short one, with holidays starting on Thursday (Corpus Christi, the best holidays because they always happen on Thursday and we always do the bridge (we say 'emendar o feriado', but since my wife works on a French company she has started to say 'fazer a ponte', which is obviously a calque). Anyway, that means I'm not finishing Lehrbuch der estnischen Sprache this week, only next week if all goes well. Today's lesson was a bit boring about where to place furniture in a room. Then at the exercise they did a sort of lyricstraining with a song from Vennaskond. I already knew this band before, and I found the exercise interesting. The videoclip shows an interesting urban scenario. Sentence of the day from the Georgian L-R at citybooks: ო, როგორ სძულს ეს სამსახური! I went through a sequence of long paragraphs so I wasn't able to follow up that much, but I really like this exercise anyway. I had the idea of slowing down the text by 20% - How so I didn't think about it before? It wasn't enough for me to feel comfortable, but slower than that would make the sound weird. After 60 pages = 6 days of practice I can say I'm already 'tuned in' for Hodejegerne's L-Ring. Today was quite comfortable and I had time to check the French translations of some words almost in real time, only by hitting the Pause button twice. If the trend persists I expect to learn a lot. I should remind myself to try text in L1 instead as well, though that can only count as audio and never as text (I'm currently counting text instead of audio). It was also a productive day for Mandarin. Funny how I'm learning a lot of vocabulary that I'm meeting only at the book. It's not that I'm just skimming through the words I don't know. I've reached a level at which I can focus at at least half of them. I'm memorizing pinyin as well, but I'm not mentally saying the words for the tones so I could recognize them if I heard them. But if I hear them somewhere, as in the Singaporean series, and I've already been introduced to the character and the pinyin, it gets easier to actually learn the word. It finally got better with German and I started to 'feel' the story and benefit fom the repeated words. As a consequence, I reached my goal of a half-challenge for German! (2500 pages). Now I can be more relaxed, but same as with Norwegian I will keep the 10-pages a day ratio in the hopes that until January I will be reading more freely and not relying so much on a parallel translation. I've started watching 'Das Adlon.' I couldn't find English subtitles, aber das macht nichts. The German ones I found might have been meant for hearing-impaired people, therefore I get to read descriptive subtitles such as "The door shuts harshly" or "The baby gurgles". Call this extra practice! I can follow along, though maybe I should pause for the few words I'm missing, so I can learn more. Russian reading is also becoming easier. And I'm eager to reach the end of Divergent, at least of the second book so I can read the film. Speaking of which...On Saturday we were at a bar, a co-worker is studying Visagismo and it also deals with the four temperaments, and of course we were trying to 'classify' everyone from work, doing the usual western mind game. Then we mentioned the name of one guy who is known to be a very methodical person, but not an inflexible person really, just methodical. She said she doesn't know how he fits, as he has elements of sanguine, phlegmatic and melancholic, to which I said "Then he must be divergent!", to which everyone laughed. Still trying to make up my mind on whether to start Duolingo Norwegian, Esperanto or none. I have the feeling I should wait till Norwegian is released from Beta, does that mean a lot of improvements and corrections of mistakes? And how long does it usually take? Wanderlust du jour: Finnish (now it makes sense to ever try Finnish, a language I used to ignore a bit. Plus, there are better materials than there is for Estonian); Modern Greek (as usual). Six hours and twenty minutes to go for the French Super Challenge! Then I will have to calculate a bit again to check which of my half-film challenges is still in danger, if only German or also Georgian and Norwegian (Russian and Chinese are already ok), then I am going to have more quality time again, maybe for output?! I can only have good hopes now. Btw, it has become easy to follow up a native French series. This is perhaps the biggest accomplishment ever since I started my daily studies. If this were the only outcome of all the time spent on all languages, it would have already been worth it. I am reading consistenly the short stories from the site Chinese Reading Practice. I'm happy to notice it became much easier now. Before I couldn't figure out the sentences without the translation. Now I seldom need the translation. Mouse-hovering over the few unknown words will do the trick. Plus I get to know some interesting chengyu. Not enough time for the forum, not the threads I'm following. At least I read all the new ones I wanted to. No time for Turkmen or Italian either, I could work more on the course for work and could go home surprisingly earlier than expected. My Norwegian challenge I posted to italki hasn't got any corrections yet. One more drawback of not posting regularly is that the regular correctors also fade out. Anyway, it was a great exercise I need to repeat. Also, just have to say I'm really proud of being part of Team Sleipnir. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4954 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 184 of 364 02 June 2015 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
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There is nothing like a day after another. I found out Institute Confucious has the same course 'Happy Journey Across China' and they use the standard player for the .mp4 file, which means I can watch the remaining lessons! It was great to figure this out. I even watched one episode of 'Happy Chinese S2' but this series has longer episodes and is also more repetitive. They introduce one idiom and repeat it at least 20x during the 14'30" of each episode. The dialogues and sentences at HC2 are also shorter and simpler than at HJAC. nevertheless, even though 'Happy Journey Across China' is more challenging I still like it better than HC2 and I want to work on it as far as possible with the episodes from the Confucious Institute and the few ones at the CCTV site that are still working.
I had to solve some issues involving bonus from my card to the air company I use the most (the one that flies to my hometown) and it took me the first hour which I use for Estonian. As a result my tasks are delayed but I hope I can get back on track. I wonder if there are Estonian audiobooks available out there, especially for the classics. That would make my life better and bring up a lot of hope about the future. I'm learning a lot and naturally from the dialogues at Lehrbuch der estnischen Sprache. Anyway, I should remember there are still other textbooks with longer texts I can use, like Naljaga Poleks. So, it turns out everything is entirely delayed. It doesn't stop me from working calmly with my Norwegian L-Ring because I'm enjoying it so much. I'm starting to understand more from the audio, that is, even if there wasn't the text. Funny how 'gut feeling' translates as 'magefølelse' but since I'm reading the translation in French for me it's just pressentiment(+o in Portuguese), so after all it sounds to me as this feeling being described as a stomach feeling. Maybe we Romance speakers wouldn't relate a suppsedly supernatural feeling with a mundane body part, hehe. I've just finished all I had from 'Helt Perfekt'. Today was also the day I understood the most from it. Now I'm going to watch a show/series that is taking a lot of diskspace, Karl & Co. I believe situational comedies that mock reality shows are the ultimate video resource. When you have an understanding of them you usually have a good grasp of natural, spoken language and a model to follow. Take 'Fais pas ci, fais pas ça', for example. No time for finishing Russian, stopped 2/3 over both video and reading. No French series at all as well. Better luck tomorrow. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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