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Finnish after 1 year: how to continue? | ||
Tags: Finnish | Study Plan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| roni Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 3461 days ago 22 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 1 of 19 22 June 2015 at 10:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I have been studying Finnish for a bit more than 1 year now.
I can read and understand news articles but in many cases it requires two passes that I read a whole article then knowing context I go back and read again. I've read two fiction books and finishing the third book now. My pace is around 10-12 pages per hour if I don't add unfamiliar words to Anki. Sometimes I can read couple of page understanding everything but then I get stuck on some sentence where I don't recognize a half of words. Anki deck contains something around 1600 words of which around 1000 are mature. I'm sure I know more words because I started with Anki after half a year of studies. So, I suppose I know well something like 2000 words (passively). I can watch historical programs in Finnish, comprehension is between 30% and 60%, so I can more or less follow and enjoy it. Grammar skills are not good. It is very hard to make myself to do these drills. I manage to do something for 2-3 evenings in a row, after that I go back to reading and watching. Too boring :) I'm not aiming at using my language actively just yet. My goals in one year are: 1) Read and understand anything 2) Understand TV programs and radio with 80-90% of comprehension. At which CEFR level am I? What would be good to try to make my studies more efficient? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 19 22 June 2015 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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You can find the CEFR guidelines here but they don't really matter that much. You probably won't neatly fit one level, and if you don't need to take an exam within 3-6 months, I'd not worry about it.
What kind of grammar topics are you currently working on? What have you covered already? Focus on the essential. Things like partitive, essive, transitive (I assume you know the genetive and the 6 locative cases by now), past tense(s), plural noun cases (especially genetive and partitive). Consider doing shorter sessions. It's better to do 15 min every day than to attempt to drill for 1 hour and burn out after 3 days. Certainly don't try to replace reading/watching with drills. You can learn without drills but not without input. See this wikia article too. If you're currently in Finland, as your profile indicates, I'd say it's better not to put off speaking. This should motivate you to do more grammar too. Don't stress about it either though, and don't feel bad about what you *can't* do. Focus on what you can :) Do you listen to Finnish music? ;) (in Finnish obv) Edited by Serpent on 22 June 2015 at 12:44pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5319 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 19 22 June 2015 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Keep reading. :-) For French, my experience was something like: 500 pages: I could actually sort of read in French, though 10% of the sentences made no sense. 2,500 pages: Big jump in reading speed, improving comprehension. 7,500 pages: Could read almost anything with very high comprehension and good speed. Your exact numbers will vary, of course, because Finish and French have different issues, and because everybody is different. But the general idea is that it takes more than 1 or 2 books to really learn to read and to build your vocabulary, and it usually gets much faster after the first several. The Super Challenge is a good choice; it's designed to require a sufficiently large quantity of reading and listening to make a big difference. Don't hesitate to cheat a bit: It can help to read translations of your favorite books occasionally, which will provide extra context and allow you to pick up vocabulary more rapidly. And consider using an ereader with a popup dictionary so you can check words quickly.
Cool! Find stuff that you enjoy watching, and watch a lot of it. In my case, I used TV series, because they had consistent voices and subjects of conversation from one episode to the next, which helped me tune in when I was just starting out. The progression went something like: Started watching Buffy: Maybe 40% comprehension, had to watch some episodes twice and read along with a transcript. End of season 1: Maybe 70% comprehension, watching once, no transcript. End of season 3: Maybe 90% comprehension. Repeated with other DVD box sets: Angel, Avatar, Ulysse 31, for 10+ seasons of television across maybe 5 shows. After that, I could just turn on French TV and channel surf, and expect to find a program I could enjoy pretty quickly. ~15 hours of channel surfing and random TV watching helped a lot.
At the very least, it's worth taking an occasional interest in grammar. Try to pay attention to little linguistic details: "Why do they say it that way and not this way?" MCD cards can help with this. You might also want to flip through a short grammar book now and then, to see if anything clicks. The goal is to get your brain to at least notice interesting details in your input, instead of just glossing over them completely. For example, here's a French phrase with a weird little detail:
Here, il is masculine, but une is feminine. If I were reading entirely passively, it would be easy to completely ignore these sorts of details. But if I occasionally flip quickly through a grammar book, and if I pay a bit of attention when reading, I can try to pick up on two or three details per page. I don't need to memorize these, or do anything with them—I just need to say, "Huh, I wouldn't have expected that." The idea is to train my adult brain to notice that the rules have changed after decades of English, and that it can't keep pounding round pegs into square holes. Instead, my brain is going to have to see what's actually on the page. At least occasionally. :-) I think is why AJATT eventually moved to using MCD/cloze cards, because it encouraged people to notice grammatical details even if they couldn't explain them. It seems like some method of noticing details seems to help.
Maybe a decent B1ish in terms of comprehension? That's usually the point where native books and TV start becoming obviously fun and more-or-less comprehensible, though it's possible to use them earlier with a few tricks. Of course, I'm not a real examiner, and I haven't tested you, so any margin of error will be huge. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| roni Diglot Newbie Finland Joined 3461 days ago 22 posts - 34 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Finnish | Message 4 of 19 22 June 2015 at 2:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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So, I understand I'm on the right track.
When I tried reading last autumn it was constant pain. I couldn't understand much without using parallel translation. I think my total amount of pages in fiction literature is around 1000 now. So, I need to read 3-4 books of Harry Potter still :) Advice about watching dubbed TV series is good. Probably I will need to use cartoons, everything else is with original sound. Serpent, do you know what to do with "rektio", does it comes with practice or I need to cram it? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5319 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 5 of 19 22 June 2015 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Pain is bad. :-) If reading books is possible but pretty painful, you're probably slightly below the B1-ish comprehension level I mentioned earlier, so I'm going to add a few more suggestions. Can you find something easier, or something which you know super-well in another language? Can you skip the hardest parts? Are you familiar with Listening/Reading? Could you find some other way to "cheat" and reduce the pain? You're not under any obligation to understand every sentence, as long as you're enjoying the book! My rules of thumb for picking reading material: 1. It should be fun to read. If it's painful, I keep looking. 2. I should be able to puzzle out most of what I need to know from context and clues. (Cheating is encouraged, and parallel texts are fine.) 3. I should notice at least some "ah-ha" moments, even though I assume it's like an iceberg and 90% of my learning is below water. The idea here is that most of my actual learning comes from "consolidating" what I can already mostly "puzzle out". Basically, I'm turning my guesses and inferences into automatic comprehension via sheer exposure. For this process to work, I need a fair bit of volume that isn't too difficult—hence my suggestion to look for things which are fun. At A2 and below, or in a completely unfamiliar language, this may require specialized tricks or at least graded readers. Edited by emk on 22 June 2015 at 4:04pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| WalkingAlone88 Newbie United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3250 days ago 8 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 6 of 19 22 June 2015 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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If you can read in Finnish after a year of studying I'd say you're doing very well. However, reading in Finnish doesn't quite have the same benefits as with other languages as the written and spoken languages are so vastly different.
I only mention this as your goals cannot, in my opinion, be achieved by reading alone. Anki can help to a certain extent, especially if you have two decks, one for written and one for spoken, just try not to focus on one more than the other as otherwise when the time comes it'll be a pretty hefty knock to your confidence. At least it was for me, I did it the other way around though, I was reasonably good with speaking, and could talk about a fair few topics but when it came to reading, I'd get frustrated because the vocab was so different to the spoken language. In short, your first goal will be realised if you carry on with what you're currently doing. Your second goal, I'd just watch as much as possible, listen to the radio and try to listen to conversational Finnish. Onnea :) *Edit: Seeing as you're in Finland, there are some awesome small dvd rental shops that sell off ex rental dvds at very low prices. I had a Kotikatsomo near me, and they'd often sell them off at as little as 1.90 euros per movie. However, if you don't have a cheap dvd shop near, it's probably cheaper to buy from Sweden (they usually have Finnish subs still) as sometimes dvds can be very expensive in Finland. Edited by WalkingAlone88 on 22 June 2015 at 4:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 5912 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 7 of 19 22 June 2015 at 5:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Ooh yeah, that sounds pretty good. Understanding 80%-90% of TV and radio? You're way ahead of me.
"Grammar skills are not good. It is very hard to make myself to do these drills." Yeah, know about this. I think need to make myself to do grammar drills. I'm not going to just pick this up, I'm pretty sure. Have you tried writing? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6384 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 8 of 19 22 June 2015 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
For me it mostly came naturally. It's just important to understand the logic of each case. If you have the morphology down, the rest will follow. Pay attention and maybe add interesting examples to SRS. No need to exaggerate the differences between standard and colloquial Finnish. I tend to think that Finland is just a less formal country, as evidenced by what my friends/acquaintances said about the teacher-pupil dynamics. But yeah get the book Kato hei (available in Uzbekistan) and maybe something about the dialects. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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