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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 4952 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 281 of 364 21 August 2015 at 11:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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At today's reading of 'I read Russian' they gave important insights on how to test and measure your comprehension of a text as well as tips for reading extensively.
The miracle is happening again. In a quiet environment, with headphones, I can understand almost everything in Norwegian in native speed, apart from mumbling. Now it's just a matter of keeping working to improve this. I saw this happen with French before and it's just the beginning and there's still a lot of room to improve. New Path: Getting Over Chinese Grammar is not worth the effort. It's just going hazardously at forced etymology. Shock of the day: English has the word 'lave', a cognate of lavar. Not done all that was planned, but at least the basics got covered. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4952 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 282 of 364 24 August 2015 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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The weekend: Polyglot Workshop, with Richard Simcott and Alex Rawlings, hosted by Jimmy Mello. It was a great event with a positive atmosphere. The presentators were really nice. I talked to Richard a bit in Norwegian. I also participated a lot in the lectures, giving examples and explaining about them, like L-R, the Radio Free Liberty app, intensive x extensive reading. And I met Nieng_Zhonghan in person, by an incredible coincidence! He is a very nice guy, too, and I had no idea we lived in the same city. In terms of content, There wasn't much new for any experienced HTLALer, but for the other people there everything sounded as revolutionary, so once again I confirmed the difference that a change of attitude and the the empowerment of the learner can make. I also confirmed there is a significant corpus of knowledge involved at learning a language at the web 2.0 age and that I can contribute to the debate.
I am practising my languages much more often now, be they French (thanks for the contacts sctroyenne), Mandarin, Norwegian or Estonian. I exchanged my first text messages in Estonian, and I am still thrilled and moved by the fact that I understood almost everything at my first message, an introduction of five lines sent by an Estonian; there was only one sentence I couldn't understand and had to translate at GT. And so I tried to make my own sentences and it didn't feel so bad either, although I'm clueless about noun morphology and whether I can trust GT on that. The icing on the cake was being contacted by a Turkish girl and writing my first sentences in Turkish. I'm reaching a comprehension level at Georgian where watching without subtitles starts to bring some fun, as I can understand some questions and answers.By the way, I completed my half challenge for Georgian. Just for a change, the time spent today on the Singaporean series was great, above average. The dialogues were interesting and I managed to focus and learn quite a lot. The correction I thought I got for Norwegian was from an earlier post. Today I got the correction for my last post. It seems italki is bringing some good results. I'm making less and less mistakes. This time it even looks like one of the Croatian notes by Radioclare, with just a few corrections ;D I still have a lot to catch up as I've been busy lately, and still trying to get better from the adbominal strain. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4952 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 283 of 364 28 August 2015 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||
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I still haven't got better from my abdominal strain. I need rest, and walking to and from work for 20 minutes each through ups and downs and sitting for 11 hours a day isn't rest. I need to stay away from the gym for yet another 15 days and take another anti-inflammatory. I had got better on Monday and thought I could get back to weightlifting and running on the threadmill, and now my oblique muscle is more stressed than the main syllable in a Russian word.
Yesterday I started reading the book I mentioned on Arabic dialects spoken in Uzbekistan. The book is written in Georgian. I still have no idea how much I'm going to understand after all, but I hope I can have at least an idea of what is being discussed. Today there was no internet at home so I couldn't watch the Papiamento videos. No big deal, I just miss them. Maybe later today I can do it, though I'm not sure as I have to take care of myself, do some exams. What I don't like about the Estonian texts at the soviet textbook are the dialogues about student life, deans, scolarships. Well, this is the same subject of the dialogues from the Continuing Course, but somehow the talent of the author of the Georgian textbook makes the language more lively and not so focused on academicisms. It seems now that I discovered that I understand much more of the real spoken (or at least typed) Estonian than I though I did, I'm a bit less patient about textbooks. I still want to keep going, though. I just flipped through 'T nagu Tallinn', the sequel to 'E nagu eesti', and it is way over my head, with too much unknown vocabulary. So, I have to try and insert lots of intermediate steps to progress smoothly before dealing with this which I regard as my final textbook. I will probably start native material before that, anyway, given how I enjoyed writing simple sentences on the language. Since I'm not getting many replies from the natives I contact, I will probably resort to writing at italki and doing the dance of correction for the corrections to fall from the firmament to my italki notebook. Estonian makes a systematic use of impersonal constructions, which reminds me of Russian and Portuguese (though those impersonals are a whole mode on its own, with present, perfect etc.) and of a heardsay mode which as I mentioned previously reminds me of Georgian. So I started Deception Point. I really expect my Chinese speed to get better. I think much is due to Pera-pera, so I should skip full nominal phrases as I improve my ability to recognize characters and understand more usual collocations. I skimmed through the book's cover and preface and just paid more attention at the prologue where the story actually starts. So far the sentences are shorter. Maybe I can start reading 4 pages instead of 3 from tomorrow on and then go through minor improvements. I really am not much concerned about SC stats as there are less than 300 pages left and when it comes to improving my Chinese even one page would be enough, as long as I can focus, pay attention to what I read, and this has been the biggest challenge so far. In my better days I see some significant improvement in my skills. I can understand what's going on in a Norwegian TV series, at normal native speed, and even when not paying full atention. I can speak about most subjects using circumloctions when necessary. So I think I have reached basic fluency in Norwegian and it's time to update my profile (there are few feelings that are as rewarding as updating one's profile in the HTLAL forum with moving a language to 'Speaks', one has yet to learn to replicate it). It is a fun comedy, Ah! Si j'étais riche. The actors speak so clearly that intermediate learners that are just starting on native materials could understand much without subtitles. I had embedded subtitles but I could have done fine without them. Now I'm going to watch La tête de maman. Papiamento allows me to notice how difficult it is to activate a word in a language and how input alone won't do that. The words of Dutch origin in Papiamento are a tiny minority, but some are essential. I can't think of any Dutch words when I try to speak Papiamento, which means I didn't succeed at activating them. When I try to speak Papiamento I don't simply speak mock Spanish. On the contrary, I speak the Papiamento words on their actual forms regardless of whether they are Spanish or Portuguese cognates. But even so I can't remember using a word of Dutch origin myself. This means I have to actively drill this word or write some paragraphs including them so I can make them an active part of my Papiamento knowledge. What would I do if I came across a situation where I'd have to use a Dutch word in Papiamento? Well, I'd probably use the Spanish word and the natives would understand just fine because most of them speak Spanish anyway and the Spanish cognate may even exist in the language in a more rare frequency/arcaic register. Here is the sentence: "E mama yòn amabel ainda ta haña tur kos dushi i ta kana prònk numà ku e chikitin riba kaya". My attempt to translate: The lovely young mother still finds everything nice and just keeps walking embellished on the street with the small kids. The non-cognate word is prònk. My paperback dictionary lists it as "knick-knack" as a noun and as "groom, adorn" as a verb. From the sentence I infer it is rather and adverb, the way the gentle young mother is walking. "Mai" means mom, just like pai means dad, as I wrote here. In Portuguese, mãe is the standard for mother. Another word: ferfelu (bothersome, c.f. vervelend). I'd have difficult remembering this word and I'd stick to 'aburrido' or even 'inconveniente". Another word: bezig; I'd stick with okupá, which is the direct translation, though 'bezig' is usually completed by what someone is busy with, in this case 'bezig pa gara e siguiente prens pa su bida'. 'Prens' is prince, not 'pray' as I first thought. Woah, now I think I discussed enough Papiamento to make up for the non-watched videos in the morning. Status with Georgian series with no subtitles: I understand most of the words in the sentence but not fast enough to understand their meaning and thus follow the story. That is how it was with Norwegian a few weeks ago. Sounds encouraging! An excerpt from Herr aller Dinge (it seems I regard references to Georgia in my other learning resources as easter eggs)>
The book "New Path: Getting Over Chinese Grammar" got a bit better at the 2nd half, with accurate and useful descriptions on how to express yourself in Chinese in situations where you have to emphasize this or that situation. Nothing that I haven't read at Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar, though. I'm feeling better but not enough to go directly to the gym (won't repeat the same mistake). I'm quite busy yet and may not even finish all my tasks, but somehow I feel so happy and so accomplished now with all this language study that seemed so hard, tiresome and unachievable and now is a sequence of comprehensible input for languages as diverse as Georgian, Russian or Mandarin and now is permeated with interactions with native speakers on a regular basis when I have no trouble with understanding and making myself understood. I'm really happy with the use I make of all this idle time I have daily. Learning languages makes you see the world through a much broader windowspan. I'm in debt with my friends here because I haven't been had enough time to follow the forum in the past days but I hope to catch up soon. I still wonder how I managed to study Uzbek and Italian. They don't take much time, anyway. I also watched my daily German episode of Futurama with few words to look-up. What is really lagging behind is Duolingo Norwegian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4952 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 284 of 364 28 August 2015 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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This morning I made my second try with TED videos and double subtitles Estonian/English with the help of the app TEDiSubs. At my first attempt I had no idea which Estonian word matched the English word, which is a problem when you start parallel reading too soon, for instance. Today I could not only understand most of the words in the subtitles but also associate the remaining ones with the English ones on-the-go, perceiving the grammatical category the word belongs to and the word order. This happens much sooner than expected: it took me over two years to reach such stage for Georgian, even after doing this experiment with tenths of TED Talk videos in Georgian with double subtitles, I ended up still not being able to analize Georgian with the English quickly enough so as those videos would qualify as n+1 comprehensible input for me. With Estonian in 1 year and 3 months I reached a higher level and can benefit from this technique much sooner than I could for Georgian. This proves how much I learned to learn from Georgian to Estonian. I managed to avoid repeating the same mistakes with Estonian that I made with Georgian. I benefitted from better-quality materials, that's true, and even the latin alphabet can be mentioned as advantage.
Sharedtalk is closing, the founder wants to found a new community, more information at the URL talk.considerate.ly . 'Deception Point' seems easier to read than Angels and Demons was. Either it is due to the more secular vocabulary or to more dialogues, at least in the beginning, or to my Chinese getting better. Or to all three combined. I spent a lot of time visiting the doctor and trying to book an ultrasound exam, so I studied very little, but it's going so well lately that I'm not worried that much. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4952 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 285 of 364 01 September 2015 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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This wasn't a productive weekend. On Saturday, I finished the daily tasks I couldn't do on Friday. On Sunday I read the LL's forum as much as I could but I'm still not even halfway through being up-to-date. HTLAL is lagging behind, too, with at least three threads I've been trying to read since last Monday. I didn't read any Georgian for my Super Challenge. I really need to catch up otherwise the goal remains unachieved. I checked my Russian stats too and it's critical, because I'm only reading 35 pages a week and there are over 300 pages to be read yet. I'm not an independent reader in either Georgian, Russian or Mandarin yet, and that's what makes the challenge more challenging (although I read Georgian extensively not caring for meaning or understanding because I have so much in Georgian, so many books I got for free from the e-book bookstores that I should probably make a use of, anyway).
My biomechanical problems are turning out to be more serious than expected and I am uncertain about a lot of things regarding the future. I still don't know how it is going to affect my studies, I'll see starting today. The book 'Deception Point' seems indeed easier than the previous ones (reading in Mandarin). I am still reluctant about doing one more daily page, especially those days when I'm leaving for doing some exams and appointments all the time. So, even if it's taking me less time to read those 3 pages from this book than it used to in the previous novels, I'd better not increase any amount at any activity by now. Norwegian is no different than French. I consider I reached 'basic fluency' when I can understand normal native speed in optimal conditions, but there are better and worse days. Today my comprehension is not as "sharp" as the day I updated my status, but the knowledge is already there, just needs some tuning in. As I wrote here about French, from now on there is still a lot to progress till you start to understand even when you are not willing to :P I don't know how much would that be in terms of hours, because when I started the SC for French I had already reached the listening stage I just reached for Norwegian, but I bet some 100 more hours will allow for a considerable improvement. I still have much room for vocabulary improvement as well in the case of Norwegian, unlike French where I was already at some 99% in terms of vocabulary when I started the SC. "f**k Ja Göhte" is in München. I was already enjoying the film and then I saw the Olympiapark and the BMW Museum. I spent too much time waiting for the appointment at the doctor's and so I could only do the normal schedule up to Russian reading. Well, at least while waiting I read 10 extra Georgian pages, which means I'm starting to catch up for the weekend that never was. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4952 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 286 of 364 02 September 2015 at 12:15am | IP Logged | ||
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One thing I miss with Assimilless languages are the hyperliteral translations. Even with languages with 4 Assimils, like Russian, but where the vocabulary pressure is so intense that I can't decide if I pay attention to the many new words or to how the sentence is formed. So far I still have trouble understanding some Russian sentences even if I know all the words individually AND I have a proper translation. The word economy of words full of cases and aspectual particles and free in word order may cover some richer meanings that the foreigner has trouble figuring out.
But I was willing to talk about Estonian: some hyperliteral translations would make my life much easier because GT, although allowing me to understand some texts, is still faulty at the sentence level and so I sometimes have to press 'Enter' to break the lines and receive individual translations for words, and even so it's difficult to make sense of each sentence on-the-go, while you're studying a long lesson. At least I have a good understanding of cases, for example, in "Mul on", "tal on" type sentences I know right away that what comes next is an attribute and I don't attempt to analize this pronoun as the subject of the sentence. I couldn't find audiobooks for the texts from Karl Ove KnausgårdI want to read, and it would be bloody expensive to have to buy both the audio and the text anyway. I've listened to two audiobooks in a row with text in Portuguese and no text in Norwegian, and I need to get back to actually reading in Norwegian. But since L-R is working so well, I will probably get around with a common author such as Jo Nesbø and try new authors when I think I've had enough with L-R, so I can buy the text only. I should bear in mind that I don't L-R in French at all, my strongest language, and it didn't prevent me from having improved my listening comprehension. L-R is efficient for vocabulary acquisition and for internalizing strucutures, but I still find TV more effective for just starting to understand in audio what you already understand as written text. Still just three pages in Chinese Deception Point. Not that my goals are under risk: I'm reading two pages extensively later on from another book. It's just that I want to become used to reading more at once, I want to push my comfortable amount a little further. Today I'm still a bit behind in schedule, so maybe when I actually have more time I can try it. I haven't lost my ability to understand Norwegian or even been overly optimistic about it, but I need some minutes to 'tune in', so it happens that from my daily 10 minutes of Karl & Co I understand the last three ones at my best level. Finished watching 'It takes two'. It was better at the end, while it was so boring in the beginning. Now I'm going to watch a film I have bookmarked so long ago, The Vietnamese Bride'. It will be my first resource with traditional characters in the subtitles, but I think I can handle it. If anyone has any other dramas to recommend with double subtitles, be they from Singapore or from Mainland China, I'd be glad to hear. I've already watched 'Don't stop believing' and 'I'm in charge'. Other series I've foundn with double subtitles: 志在四方/The Dream Makers, 微笑正义 Poetic Justice, 千方百计 Game Plan, 警徽天职 C.L.I.F. . I found a few others with English-subtitles only; maybe I should try other links with double subtitles or even try English-only to see if that improves my listening. On the other hand, I need stuff from Northern China because I tend to stick to a Beijing accent and I have the least exposure to it. I tried to watch the first few minutes of Анжелика without subtitles, it was a recap scene from the previous episode. No success. Since I only have transcripts for eight episodes, I'm going to watch the remaining two I still have subtitles for and move on, to resume when my level is better. I finished DLI Uzbek. It is just a competencies course, not the old one with audio, which I think doesn't exist for Uzbek, but the fancy pdf one. This course is more on the line of "beggars can't be choosers" - I've used it for Georgian as well. The formatting is confusing, grammar is poorly explained on the line of "That's all you have to worry about as a soldier" and the many exercises that consist mostly of translation are what helps the most, but my knowledge wasn't constructed consistently enough to allow for me to actually learn something. I admit I'm dabbling, so a more serious user may make a better use of it. We are supposed to study Uzbek until September 30th at the Yürükler challenge, so I have to pick a new resource. At first I wouldn't want to spoil good resources at the challenge, not even GLOSS. So I'm going for Parlons Ouzbek. The general info Parlons gives doesn't usually get lost, at least the cultural, overall linguistic one, and even the actual language-usage insights can be found later in other works. So, Parlons Ouzbek be it! I will be adding some more French pages to the SC and I won't abide to any daily commitment in terms of number of pages, like my usual ten. I will rather just stop when I feel tired and notice I'm not learning. The book has 297 pages so I will try at least to sync its end with the end of the Uzbek season at this challenge. Then comes Kazakh which is a whole new game. Assimil just explained in a paragraph that Italian uses the same rule as Portuguese for a restrictive and a nonrestrictive subordinate clauses, that is, just commas and the lack thereof. The quest for transcripts for the 4th series of Kuxnya and on has started. Apart from the transcripts we all know of, I found subtitles in languages like Bulgarian and Lithuanian. Still not the 4th season but I'm hopeful. I also found about about the film Kuxnya in Paris' for which I found Russian and Georgian and subtitles in an obscure language I'm not learning, which doesn't matter, since I'll be just pasting at Google Translate anyway. Finishing the day with a nice Kuxnya episode. Not that the episode was brilliant, but it was great Georgian practice and I understood most of the Georgian sentences . The translation by Google for the Russian transcript wasn't bad either. No time for output today and I didn't practice at HelloTalk or Skype either. Maybe I should join the daily Output Challenge. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4952 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 287 of 364 02 September 2015 at 11:35pm | IP Logged | ||
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After one day with close to zero language practice, let me tell you now about today:
It started with the French class. I know, it's expensive and I could have used the time for putting some tasks forward from my daily schedule as I am going to have a busy day, but even so I went for a 30-min instant class and it worked quite fine. I had no big trouble expressing myself, I only blanked at some situations and words that are typical of my life in Brazil, but the time invariably comes when you have to talk about your own life and culture in a foreign language. For example, I wouldn't know how to say "frango com quiabo" in French. "Quiabo seems to be a South American vegetable (maybe African, too?) and it translates more often as 'gombo', so that'd be in the likes of 'poulet au gombo'. I also started paying attention to my intonation and I don't think my pronunciation was that terrible, although there were some slips of the tongue and the usual mess with prepositions we make at whatever language. I really liked the teacher and I plan on having other classes with him, always looking at the budget availability of course, as I don't give many classes at italki since my time schedule is tight and so I don't have many credits left. Then I decided to sign up for Speaky, and I was immediately contacted by a Brazilian guy from Rio who learns Mandarin and is already at an intermediate level. He told me about an app for talking with Chinese people, I should check it later, 微信/wechat. (Btw, I'm glad I remembered because Speaky doesn't seem to record previous chat sessions or at least I can't open it now the person is offline and I can't access his profile. That's a serious drawback as I could, for example, paste the conversation at italki for corrections). When we chatted in Mandarin, I was impressed at how easy it was to come up with words. Sometimes I'd give up and look a word up to type in, and then I'd remember the Mandarin word when I was about to type the Chinese word. I was also contacted by a guy from an Arab country who wanted to chat in Italian even though I said I'm not good at Italian, from a Brazilian who is learning French and Norwegian and from a Taiwanese girl. Another drawback is that I can't simply search for Georgian people, for example, they give me matches of Georgian people who are learning Portuguese, which is a limited microuniverse, so I added English as my native language but even so that doesn't feel right and I might be missing Georgians who already speak English and want to learn French or Spanish, for example. If you use the site and have a workaround to this, please tell us. Accomplished Language Textbook: Учебник эстонского языка/Eesti keele õpik 
Simply the best when it comes to format of the lessons, variety of sentences, parsing/rhythm of the lessons, quantity and quality of sample sentences. I can't speak about the exercises because I didn't do them as the book lacks an answer key, but I found this to be the one with the most illustrative/appropriate examples within the grammar explanations of all those I've studied from, including renowned works in English and German. It has the best graded learning curve, as well, not so steep and not the genre of book where you are expected to learn all the exceptions to a morphological rule at once. The quality of the texts and dialogues is very high, too, apart from some too centered on stipendia and student life. Texts are long enough to sound natural. Pity there is no audio and no answer key. This book was essential for bringing my Estonian closer to a B1 level about 1 year and a half faster than I achieved the same level with Georgian and Russian. The good thing of Estonia being a small country is that the capital city isn't reputed as just the chaotic city with a large metropolitan area, as in some countries. On the contrary, it is a charming city with an important historical background and which is valued by the other inhabitants, or at least so is the impression I have from the lessons. I feel somehow orphan now, as the book has 40 lessons. Now it's time to take one step further. I'm going to use the lessons from the textbook 'Naljaga Poleks'. It's mostly dialogues so this is almost an intro to native materials. There is audio, which is more important. Then I'll see if I'll go back reviewing grammar or start native materials. There are other textbooks left but they are either too basic or too advanced (T Nagu Tallinn, for example). The reading from 'I Read Russian' was perhaps the easiest so far. Finally readers are starting to do their job, that is, work as a warm-up for native materials. So far I didn't have enough vocabulary for trying any of the readers, and today I really had to look up just a few words. I understand almost everything when listening to the Norwegian audiobook. I have no trouble finding where I am at Portuguese the text when I start playing the audio first or just wade drift away my attention. Accomplished Language Textbook: New Path: Getting Over Chinese Grammar 
Today is a day of resource completions. Like I wrote here, I don't particularly recommend this book as I find at least half of its explanations too confusing and there is no pinyin. There is not much you wouldn't learn from the previous book I studied, Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: a Practical Guide. If you are an advanced learner you might still benefit from some insights, though. Now I have only three 'textbooks' left that I want to study and they are fairly non-conventional: Schaum's Outline of Chinese Vocabulary, Streetwise Chinese and Chinese: A Comprehensive Grammar. Schaum's Outline of Chinese Vocabulary has a steep, demanding learning curve; Streetwise Chinese deals with informal language while I still am not excelling at the more formal language (I was at a better level when I studied Streetwise French); A Comprehensive Grammar is from the same publisher I just studied a book from, Routledge (Modern Mandarin Chinese Grammar: A Practical Guide). I'll give Schaum's Outliine of Chinese vocabulary a try. The learning curve seems steep and the lessons are rich in vocabulary, but maybe that's what I need now. I will probably count pages as halves for the SC, as it's mostly Chinese. Not everything has translation but there is pinyin so I can translate the words I still don't know. If I notice one chapter a day is a killer, I'll go for at least 6 pages which will add 3 more for the SC. I took another look at Streetwise Chinese too and I recommend it (bear in mind the problem with all such books, with trying to add too much slang at once and making the dialogues sound unnatural), if only just for learning to recognize some slang passively and for the audio and dialogues, anyway. Comes next. One thing that leaves me wondering about language exchange: just like sctroyenne said that the first language of exchange is likely to remain the prioritary one, it seems the first 'script' used remains. So, when a Georgian greeted me in English today at Speaky and I decided to reply in Georgian, I refrained the impulse of writing in Latin characters and went to GT just to type in გამარჯობა!. I may regret saying this, but reading Georgian from the same translated book starts to get easy. It seems I just have to resolve some words that appear often and are tricky to remember, and so I'll be able to read extensively and understand the meaning more precisely. The comprehension of the series without subtitles wasn't that bad either, although I was busy and was mostly listening. I tried to catch up but stopped before the German (listening-)reading part so that's that. I still think the day was quite productive and insightful even if some languages felt a bit behind. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4952 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 288 of 364 04 September 2015 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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Started Naljaga Pooleks. The dialogues are very interesting. They sound very natural and are repeated and explained in Russian. It sounds like Pimsleur or Michael Thomas. I have the transcripts for the dialogues (Estonian only), which I paste at GT, and so far it works fine. Anyway, it seems my life will be much easier in the next days as the whole sound file has 13 minutes and I can do other stuff in the 'Russian breaks'. I used to spend 30 minutes at each lesson from the previous textbook. There is a song at the end! Today's song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2HaMTJY02g So I started Schaum's Outline of Chinese Vocabulary. It is pretty demanding. I did 6 pages instead of a full chapter. The first lesson is thematic on preparing to board on a flight. There are some sample sentences and the vocabulary is repeated and drilled almost naturally alongside the lesson, which I appreciate. Just not recommended for beginners, but rather for people who are starting to move into basic fluency, as it allows for some vocabulary gaps to be filled in such thematic lessons. In my case, I probably won't remember most of these new words and I'd have to review this book again when I go to China. So I can say the book is a bit above my level, but it doesn't mean I won't benefit from it, on the contrary. And I do like its format. Besides, reaching my goal for the SC is no issue as I'll be adding 3 more pages to it every day. I may have an idea what is going on with my German, i.e. the lack of progress. I'm not reserving any quality time for German. When I start German L-R I will have already done my first and even my second activities for most of my other languages, so I'm much likely to feel tired. Even Russian gets quality time in the morning, as textbook study which currently is a plain reader. Besides, I'm doing L-R now instead of just parallel-reading and while more efficient it is alo more tiresome as it takes longer. Perhaps I need output for German? Anyway, time to resume where I stopped on Tuesday as yesterday I had no time for German. I finished "Advanced" Russian from the Goethe-Verlag tests, and now I'm going for Advanced Chinese. Then Advance Estonian and it's over until I add another language. Today was just enough to finish the tasks. Still a lot left behind, forum, output, Kuxnya. At least I keep the ball rolling. I am likely to need a surgery but since it's not emergential now starts the pilgrimage to doctors, labs, healthcare customer service for authorizations etc. My daily activities such as gym and jogging might be put on hold for some more weeks. Maybe I can eat healthy and stay healthy as long as possible, no allergies getting back or chronical diseases. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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