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Serpent’s log

 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
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Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 105 of 119
13 December 2008 at 8:44am | IP Logged 
http://www.change.org/ideas/view/introduce_esperanto_as_a_fo reign_language_subject_in_schools
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 106 of 119
30 December 2008 at 11:27pm | IP Logged 
Here's my post from the goals for 2008 thread:
Serpent wrote:
So the year is almost over now... Anyone 100% satisfied? ;)

I'm like 90% satisfied with my Finnish. I had my first job ever at Moscow Non/fiction bookfair and used Finnish a lot quite successfully :) My level of listening comprehension seems to be finally getting closer to those of my other skills, even though I can't say I've done much for it consciously.
I've read quite a few books in it - LOTR, Hobbit, The Children of Húrin, The Unfinished Tales by Tolkien, Narnia's Chronicles by Lewis, Pawn of Prophecy by Eddings, Troll - a Love Story (Ennen päivänlaskua ei voi) by Johanna Sinisalo, The Last Messages (Viimeiset viestit) by Hannu Luntiala and some delightful poetry by Eino Leino, as well as a short novel Crime (Rikos) by him.
Less satisfied with my Portuguese and German. I've had classes in both and during them was unmotivated to do anything else :/ I'm passively intermediate in Portuguese thanks to the parallel book that I've read in December and my German active skills are finally getting better.
Strangely enough, with Latin the situation is the reverse - I haven't done almost anything except flash cards since my classes ended in June and I passed the exam (which was on my birthday:)) with an excellent mark :)
I'm not really satisfied with my Esperanto - I could be at basic fluency already. Probably the 400 or so roots in the list at lernu aren't enough, and besides I haven't found any heavy music in Esperanto :(
Belarusian - not satisfied :( I've done way too little studying. Perhaps I can't even claim I've been studying it actively, because on many weeks I didn't do anything except flashcards. I'll try to change it though, so I'm not going to switch my Belarusian to "studying on and off"
English - absolutely dissatisfied. uni is killing my love to it :/
I've also started two new languages in autumn although I hadn't really intended to - Romanian and Toki pona. Quite satisfied with both, but more with Toki pona, because I know practically all its grammar ;)


Most of this was in my post with goals for December, so here´s a summary of what I've done ever since: mostly English, Finnish and Portuguese, some Toki pona and Romanian, everything else only in Mnemosyne. I read the parallel book in Portuguese and it has really increased my passive knowledge; I've also completed Pimsleur Romanian I, but haven't had any opportunities to use it recently.

I've been postponing posting my goals for 2009 because I'm not sure about them... but that's what I currently hope to achieve:

Finnish: reach advanced fluency in 2009 or early 2010, ie before I'll have studied it for 5 years (27 June 2010). Some particular plans:
-read more original books than translated ones
-finally do the business Finnish course that I bought back in spring
-listen to some challenging stuff (other than music with growling/screaming vocals which are hard to understand in any language ;))
-do more scriptorium

Esperanto: reach basic fluency. It's frustrating that I've been wandering round it so long already... Hopefully I'll achieve it by learning the roots at lujz.org (or whatever was the url of the page linked in Volte's log), reading Pushkin (at least the things I've already read in Russian) and finally reading Lundo ekas sabate that I quickly abandoned, doing the exercises on suffixes and starting to use Esperanto actively.

German, Portuguese - that's where my doubts are. I'm quite sure I can reach basic fluency in one of them, but probably not in both. My first goal is to get my active Portuguese to intermediate level, and then... I'll see later. I'm afraid it might keep me from getting fluent in German that when I have classes I'm not really motivated to do much outside of them.

Belarusian - intermediate level. It's extremely frustrating to write the same goal as last year :-(

Latin - no clue yet, probably not enough time for it before February

Romanian - practically the same as Latin, although I'll probably watch sport broadcasts in it

Toki pona - dunno what's fluency in it, since once you start using compound words as units the point is kinda lost - you just memorize cliches instead of thinking in simple categories. But I want to translate something by Tolkien into it :-)

As for Tolkien btw, I wanna learn to write Tengwar - I find it embarrassing that I still can't do so. I'll start (have already started, in fact) by practicing writing Toki pona in it because it uses just 14 letters, and they're all pretty straightforward (ie I can be sure the person who adapted it for writing in Toki pona can't have done anything wrong - unlike Finnish, unfortunately:/). I'm also going to learn the Greek alphabet - to be able at least to read the examples in books on linguistics.


Oh and as for English the goal is again not getting kicked away from the uni. Perhaps improving it (my English) - depends on how much the classes suck.
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 107 of 119
31 December 2008 at 11:18pm | IP Logged 
I celebrated New Year at my favourite band's gig (Charon), and for some reason most songs that were played before and after the gig were in German...is it a sign that I should aim for fluency in German and not in Portuguese yet? 0_o Besides, on my birthday in 2008 Germany won over Portugal at EURO....huh


Happy New Year everyone!
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 108 of 119
01 January 2009 at 4:39pm | IP Logged 
Oh and one more point... I used to think 2009 would be solely a year of consolidation... But knowing myself I now don't have any illusions, I'm pretty sure I will start something new. The most likely candidates are Old Church Slavonic, Italian, Danish and Dutch - although for some reason it's easier for me to start a language which is not on my hit list, so that I could do whatever I feel like doing without thinking about getting fluent in the long run....
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 109 of 119
05 January 2009 at 1:41pm | IP Logged 
Reading about Volte's great progress finally made me do something about my Esperanto. It feels a bit strange to read Pushkin not in Russian :D I'm quite satisfied with my comprehension - it's around 90%. Haven't yet tried anything I hadn't already read though... Oh, and it turned out the translations I started with are from the 1920's :D

I've also found a great free tool for tracking what you do at the computer :) the url is http://www.rescuetime.com. you can put the sites you visit and applications you use into various categories, assign tags to them, mark the efficiency for particular categories/tags and it will show pretty graphs on how efficiently you spend the time (or not so pretty - I hate looking at my 0.3 efficiency score for January 1st :DDD)
You can also set goals as long as they fit the pattern: spend more/less than X hours on Y every day/weekday/week. My current goals are:

Less than 2.3h/day on Sports (it turned out I spend much less time on it than I thought I did :D although there haven't been that much games or news recently...)
More than 14h/week on Language Studies
More than 9h/week on finnish
More than 0.1h/day on mnemosyne      (just to ensure I do my repetitions daily)
More than 1h/week on esperanto
More than 1.5h/week on toki pona

For the language tags (Finnish, Esperanto, Toki pona) I include also anything I read in these languages online.

Hope someone finds this site useful! :)
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 110 of 119
18 January 2009 at 6:40pm | IP Logged 
Isn´t this lovely? :D
(0%) goal met 0 out of 1 More than 1h/week on esperanto      time spent: 58.1m/week
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 111 of 119
25 January 2009 at 12:32pm | IP Logged 
I feel pleasantly intoxicated...just watched an entire match on a Danish channel.... really beautiful language *_* it was getting tiresome occasionally to understand as little as I did, but I was just enchanted and I had to keep on watching ♥
I think I'm going to set a personal record this weekend by watching 6 matches in one weekend. Only 5 so far though - two in Portuguese, one in Spanish, today's one completely in Danish and one more mostly in Danish but also in Romanian when the Danish channel didn't work...funny how Romanian felt familiar after Danish :D Oh, and I did watch Juventus - Fiorentina in Italian for a little while, but the quality was too bad and I ended up watching it in Portuguese instead :D
Going to watch one more match in Portuguese today.
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6357 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 112 of 119
07 February 2009 at 11:41pm | IP Logged 
I'm back from my holidays in Belarus. Pretty satisfied with my language studies during them, except that I spent way too little time preparing for retaking my English exam :/ Not that I count it as language studies though - I've decided to treat my English classes simply like a course I have to take.
But it's nicer to speak about what I'm satisfied with :) I studied a lot of Finnish as usual, and finally got around to doing scriptorium daily - I'm nearly through with my fave chapter of LOTR now. I also learned quite a few words by Iversen's method. As for other languages, I watched TV in Belarusian a few times and in German once, conjugated Portuguese verbs and wrote something in toki pona daily. Funny that although I hadn't studied any Esperanto since I was in Moscow, last night I found myself thinking in a Finnish-Esperanto mixture.


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