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Kimchizzle’s Russian journal | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Kimchizzle Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3225 days ago 24 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 9 of 16 04 August 2015 at 5:27am | IP Logged | ||
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@smallwhite
Thanks a lot for your words of encouragement! It means a lot. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kimchizzle Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3225 days ago 24 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 16 04 August 2015 at 5:33am | IP Logged | ||
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Lately, I've been updating my log on another language forum.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=77 9 I'm going to being updating this log too, since not everyone uses the other forum. July 25 My Russian study has slowed a bit since I'm spending time reviewing words with Anki more. But I think it will be worth it in the long run. Eventually I will need to study some grammar, because I get confused about certain things with just listening and reading. For example, Russian seems to use prefixes with verbs a lot, and I'm not always sure how the prefix is changing the verbs or why it is needed. Once I build my vocabulary to a higher level, I will start with a bit of grammar that confuses me. I'm thinking about going through huliganov youtube series when I feel ready for grammar. I learned about some really cool French bands yesterday from Sctroyenne's log that I've been listening to a lot. I've been wanting to find more current French bands as I was only familiar with bands that were popular five years ago when I was living in France. I listened to a Mexican podcast today about history and philosophy. I was able to understand most things due to lots of shared cognates with French in academic language. But listening to Spanish like that with lots of French cognates, I know I experience an illusion of understanding somewhat and feel I understand more of the Spanish than I do. Edited by Kimchizzle on 04 August 2015 at 5:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kimchizzle Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3225 days ago 24 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 11 of 16 04 August 2015 at 5:34am | IP Logged | ||
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July 27
Russian The weekend wasn't ideal for my Russian studies. I planned to study some flashcards on Anki but I missed a full day of studies. My mind is not as energetic when studying Russian as it was, I feel myself drifting off of focus more often when studying. I'm hoping things will change this coming week. I may decide not to add more cards to Anki for awhile and just study new material. A problem I've noticed currently is I seem to confuse Russian words that look similar to me much more often than I would like. For example, толька and точно, I kept getting mixed up. I think it has something to do with unfamiliarity to Cyrillic alphabet still. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kimchizzle Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3225 days ago 24 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 12 of 16 04 August 2015 at 5:35am | IP Logged | ||
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July 27
Russian Today I had more motivation studying Russian. I went through my Anki cards that were due and then did some listening and reading to the podcasts. I decided today I would go back to the older lessons I was using before for listening and reading. The podcasts were just a little too difficult for me to be able to remember the vocabulary efficiently. I was adding ~200 new words to my Anki deck per podcast. The podcasts were around 10 minutes long each and designed for foreigners learning Russian, but were at a higher level than I have currently. I think this was causing me to become frustrated and demotivated more. I switched back to the lessons, which are only around 2 minutes long and only have around 10-20 words I don't understand. So I plan to go through two or three lessons a day and add new cards to Anki. 40-60 words to try to remember a day will be much easier to manage than trying to cram 200 words every two days or so. I think this approach will also allow me to feel my progress better which will be good for my motivation. Also, I've been trying to stay true to my original goal of only learning to read and listen to Russian, and not focus on speaking or writing. But I think I may have to learn to write a bit. I think writing could help me cement some vocabulary deeper in my mind, by repeating sentences in writing or trying to create my own sentences with difficult vocabulary words. I think it would help. Today in the LWT lessons, I learned some simple sentences, but it was a good to see my progress that I can express myself with a sentence with a dependent clause. я изучаю русский язык, потому что мне нравится русская культура. I have to refer to my notes quite a lot to type that cause I haven't been practicing writing at all, so I'm very forgetful of the spellings. But I'm happy that I've learned enough so far to be able to produce that sentence with help, and understand the meaning by reading. This is a nice encouragement. I guess that нравиться always takes a declined pronoun, instead of a pronoun in the nominative. I'm not actively studying Russian grammar, but I think I notice a pattern with the verb, the pronoun isn't in the nominative. It reminds me of when I took a German course once, you couldn't say, Ich ist Kalt, you had to say, Mir ist Kalt. I guess the more exposure to these things, the more I'll begin to see more patterns. French Je vais écrire cela en français parce que ça fait longtemps que j'ai écrit en français et j'ai besoin d'améliorer mon écriture et ma grammaire. Je sens beaucoup que j'ai oublié tant d'idiomes et de grammaire puisque je suis revenu aux Etats-Unis de la France il y a 5 ans. J'habitais en France pendant 10 mois à Rennes et j'ai étudié intensivement le français à un haut niveau. Malheareusement, j'ai perdu beaucoup de ce que j'ai appris en France et je fais beaucoup des fautes maintenant. En fait, j'ai le sentiment qu'il y a une grande faute dans la dernière phrase mais je ne suis pas sûr. Aujourd'hui, j'ai écouté à plusieurs chansons françaises et j'ai lu leurs paroles. Il y a un groupe rock, Fauve, qui est très cool et unique, auquel j'ai écouté le plus. J'ai appris ce groupe du log de Sctroyenne. Dans le groupe, le chanteur, il ne chant pas, mais il parle les paroles comme les gens parlent dans la rue mais plus poètique. Le style de groupe est très génial. I also watched a video yesterday that gave me some motivation and I heard some wise words. The difference between people who are good at learning languages and those who never learn a foreign language is that the people who are good at languages don't give up when the going gets tough. They press on and keep trying and eventually learn more languages. While the other person gives up too easily and therefore never learns. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kimchizzle Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3225 days ago 24 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 13 of 16 04 August 2015 at 5:36am | IP Logged | ||
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July 29
Russian Yesterday, my Russian studies didn't go so well. I studied my Anki flashcards and then ended up taking a nap after diner. I slept well into the night and was too tired to study Russian more when I woke up. Today, I went through my Anki cards and did more listening and reading. My brain seems happier with me that I'm only trying to learn 30-50 words a day now. I was able to learn the reverse sentence structure of what I wrote last time which was fun. я изучаю русский язык, потому что мне хравится пусская культура. Мне нравится русская культура, поэтому я изучаю русский язык. Today I read something that gave me a motivation boost. It said even only learning 10 new words a day, in a year you will have learned 3,650. I had never thought of it that way before. French I'd been looking for a dictionary file I could import into my learning with texts program, so that I wouldn't have to manually enter definitions for 1,000's of words I already know. I happened to find one that is just in French, which is not a problem for me, and had 26,000 definitions. Good enough for what I need. L'autre jour, j'ai commencé à utiliser Lang-8 pour améliorer mon écriture. J'avais raison, il y avait certaines fautes avec ma grammaire, mais elles ne sont pas aussi mal que j'ai pensées originalement. Je crois que je commencerai à lire un peu de littérature pour m'aider apprendre plus de la vocabulaire et des structures de grammaire compliqué. J'ai un roman de Michel Houellebecq qui j'ai acheté en France que je vais possiblement lire. J'ai entendu plusieurs fois qu' Houellebecq est un écrivain qui est l'un de plus difficiles pour les étrangères à comprendre. Mais je ne peux pas vérifier la vérité de cette déclaration. En utilisant le programme, LWT, j'ai l'intention d'ajouter plusieurs chapitres de Dumas ou Balzac. Mais je ne suis pas sûr si je puisse trouver d'audio. En addition, je continue à écouter aux groupes français et un peu des nouvelles. J'ai encore commencé à écouter à Noir Désir, un de mes groupes préférés. Aussi, j'ai regardé un peu d'une documentaire de la pizza le dernier semaine. La documentaire était plutôt ennuyeux mais j'ai appris un mot que je n'avais pas entendu même une fois, "croustillant." lol Singlish I've been thinking it would be fun to see how much dialect I could learn of Singlish. I have a few Singaporean friends from my days at university, but I'm not sure if they will have time to teach me. Maybe I will search for a person to help me learn Singlish on the net. I think it would be fun to see how far I can get learning a bit of dialect. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kimchizzle Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3225 days ago 24 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 16 04 August 2015 at 5:38am | IP Logged | ||
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July 31
Spanish Lately I've been neglecting studying any Spanish due to time restraints. I may try the 6WC with Spanish though and using the subs2srs method. I've noticed there is a lot of things available in Spanish using that approach. Spanish would be a beneficial language for me to improve if I ever gather the motivation to do so. I recently bought a book translated in Spanish as well, a crime thriller by James Patterson. Wanderlust I've been experiencing a bit of wanderlust recently, thinking about other languages that would be fun to learn. But I've been trying to suppress these types of thoughts somewhat, because I don't have time to study more languages than I currently am, and I need to continue to devote a good amount of time to Russian. I fear if I let my wanderlust win, and start learning even a bit of a new language than I will not continue studying Russian as hard. So many languages I want to learn though. :( Estonian, Cantonese, Swedish, Kazakh, Korean, Latin, Ukrainian. I did buy a Latin grammar at the used bookstore. I don't think it will cause me to neglect Russian reading a grammar book. Edited by Kimchizzle on 04 August 2015 at 5:38am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kimchizzle Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3225 days ago 24 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 15 of 16 04 August 2015 at 7:21am | IP Logged | ||
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Aug 2
Russian I feel my Russian studies have gone to a snail's pace. I can't study during the weekends because I am away from my computer, so I have to rely on flashcards. I've been doing flashcards with Anki for 11 days so far, I only have 700 cards so far, but I have different cards for of the same words, like different conjugations of the same verb, or different cases of the same nouns and adjectives. I don't really feel like flashcards fit my learning style, but I'll continue sticking with it for a little while longer. I've read in the past some people say not to group your flashcards in similar groups, like a deck for animal and another deck for fruit, so I haven't been doing that. But I'm not so convinced, I think it can be helpful to have different decks for themes of words. I plan to make a deck for months of the year and days of the week sometime. I feel like I can learn them quicker as a themed group. Maybe themed decks are worse for memory retention, I'm not sure. I feel like I need more exposure to listening to Russian. I was listening to Russian radio broadcasts previously, even though I didn't understand anything, but I've gotten bored of that since I can't understand. Aug 3 Russian Anki: 750 cards total reviewed 100 today My progress in Russian feels steady, but I need to try to be more efficient in my time management. Today, I reviewed Anki as well as some of the previous lessons listening and reading cause I still find certain words more difficult to remember than others. I think reviewing past lessons briefly, helps with getting those words into my memory better. I would love to know why certain words stick easily and others just don't want to be learned. :lol: Today I noticed a twitter post from надя толоконникова that I was able to understand parts of. She wrote, В Китае женщину обвинили в том, что она атаковала полицейского, потрогав его грудью, и за это ее посадили then she posted a link to the story in English. I almost understood the entire first clause. В Китае женщину - I thought this either meant "In China, woman", or "Chinese woman, with my gut leading me more towards the former. I had never seen the word обвинили before. в том - I thought either meant "from that" or "at that". The second clause, I understood что она. I guessed that атаковала was a cognate with attacked in English. полицейского, I'd studied this word a few weeks ago but haven't seen it much, so I forgot it, even though it is could also be considered an English cognate I think. The next part of the sentence, I didn't understand, потрогав его грудью. I was fairly certain that его was his/her, but I had never encountered the words, потрогав and грудью. The last part, I understood the small words, but had never seen the verb посадили. Later after I read the story and got the context to understand the words, I didn't know, I used googletranslate to see how close I was in understanding. It was nice to see I am actually learning and only around a month of studies at that :shock: and to use this as a measurement of how far I still need to go in my studies. There still are some things that confuse me, I think due to my unfamiliarity with Russian grammar. Edited by Kimchizzle on 04 August 2015 at 10:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Kimchizzle Diglot Newbie United States Joined 3225 days ago 24 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Russian | Message 16 of 16 07 August 2015 at 5:52am | IP Logged | ||
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August 5th
Russian I just made today a review day. Reviewed Anki and went through my older LWT lessons. I'm sure reading in Cyrillic alphabet is slowing my progress. Perhaps I should've chose Latin instead of Russian. Anyways, one foot in front of the other, little by little. French Last night, I began using Lyricstraining for my French. What a great website. I found it very fun typing the words to songs and also very beneficial for spelling and listening comprehension. Also, the website will help me improve my typing skills while cause I need to type fast to keep up with the song lyrics. Today, I read a few chapters of my Houellebecq novel. I decided to make flashcards for unfamiliar words in Anki and made around ten cards, mainly words I felt I couldn't remember on my own. I was using two French only dictionaries, one from Larousse and an extremely in-depth one from the Centre National de Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales. I had always used the CNRTL dictionary in the past because it was so detailed, but I found the Larousse was good because it was more straightforward. I also used wordreference for words I had trouble following the definition in French, mostly plant and animal names. I made my flashcards like this, Front: the word in French Back: English definition (if needed), French definition and one or two synonyms, followed by a sentence using the word.
French words of the day: la drosophile, le cerfeuil, gazouiller, déchiqueter Spanish Went through three lessons of Duolingo. One of my lessons today about possession was useful because I had forgotten about the long-form of possession in Spanish. So I learned things like, El pescado es suyo. La cebolla es mio. lol So that was a good lesson for me. Edited by Kimchizzle on 07 August 2015 at 5:53am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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