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Learning a language for 6 weeks | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6983 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 49 of 195 08 April 2007 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm getting cold feet. I appreciate the resources that Farley and Sprachprofi posted about German. I actually downloaded the first three series from Deutsche-Welle, and have listened to the first two lessons, but I'm afraid it will take away time from my studies of Spanish, which I've yet master. German is really after Spanish, Esperanto, and French (and possibly ASL) on my "hit list". I imagine since I'm 10-15 years from any real study of German, (if it's to ever happen), that the time now might be more fruitfully applied to another language. There's an Esperanto group in my city, so it's a practical choice, and I've studied it to some extent, but I have reservations that it could interfere with my Spanish speaking. I'm really wanting to have my Spanish almost at advanced fluency before I return to Esperanto. On the French front, I studied it for a year and a half in university about 25 years ago, and was quite proficient for such a short period of study. I haven't looked at French for more than a couple of hours in the past two decades though. As far as the experiment, I don't know if it would be cheating to participate with French. Although my active knowledge of French is extremely limited, I have no doubt that I'd ramp up much faster than had I never studied it, even though my current motivation would pale in comparison to what I had during my study at university. I have the Assimil courses for French, so the only obstacle is that it may take time away from my Spanish. I'd expect less interference than with Esperanto, particularly if I shoot for listening and reading skills, rather than speaking. Edited by luke on 08 April 2007 at 1:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6225 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 50 of 195 08 April 2007 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'd say take the opportunity to refresh your French. We can call it let's see what happens with stuff we thought we forgot -experiment. You're fussing too much I think. I believe you can do all three.
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| patuco Diglot Moderator Gibraltar Joined 6793 days ago 3795 posts - 4268 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Personal Language Map | Message 51 of 195 08 April 2007 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't see why not! That's what I intend to do anyway.
I agree. I'll start my own Six Week Challenge Log next week when I start the challenge. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Pintbomb Newbie United States Joined 6218 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 52 of 195 08 April 2007 at 6:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was just looking at this site as I would like to learn more languages and think this would be an exciting experiment. I'm just learning German in school, but I would like to participate and learn Esperanto for the 6 week period. I will probably spend 30-60 min a day on it I guess if I can keep the motivation up.
So count me in! Btw, if there's anything else I should really do besudes lernu.com lemme know by PM please! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6328 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 53 of 195 08 April 2007 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For judging, how about an interview type test from a native speaker. That would cover speaking/listening.
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| Knarvil Newbie United States Joined 6237 days ago 10 posts - 13 votes Studies: French, Spanish, Norwegian | Message 54 of 195 08 April 2007 at 10:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As a measure of what we learn in 6 weeks, perhaps BEFORE WE START STUDYING we could take a random Wikipedia entry in the target language (and selected pages from a novel, or newspaper article, or whatever source material we have) and highlight everything we know or recognize. This will make clear to us our relative advantage from having already studied a similar language. After highlighting the vocabulary or grammar, we put the papers away and do not look at them again while we are studying. Then at the end of 6 weeks we revisit the print-outs to assess how much more we understand (and whether we were correct the first time with our highlighting).
Otherwise, I don't think it will really be that helpful to announce in 6 weeks that we now understand 60% of what we read in Swedish (if without realizing it) we understood 55% of what we read 6 weeks earlier thanks to existing knowledge of German, Norwegian, English, etc. Ditto for Romance languages. But how much did you increase your knowledge of Swedish or Portuguese or whatever after 6 weeks? How many (more) kanji characters would one recognize in a newspaper article or story after 6 weeks of memorizing them? I believe you could arrange a similar assessment with a native speaker if you asked the native speaker to ask you specific questions or discuss certain topics and then record the results. After 6 weeks, repeat the interview or chat. I like the challenge and plan to join, only I can't decide whether to make use of those books/languages on my shelves I have never studied, or use the challenge as an opportunity to order something new. 6 weeks after all is just a brief passionate affair, not a lifetime commitment. I'd prefer to choose a language others are also working on for the 6WC as extra incentive to motivate me to keep working on my log during the 6 weeks. If anyone is up for it, I'd be open to finally exploring a Celtic language (about which I know next to nothing) though I don't yet have a book on any of them... Edited by Knarvil on 08 April 2007 at 10:39pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| MeshGearFox Senior Member United States Joined 6473 days ago 316 posts - 344 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian | Message 55 of 195 09 April 2007 at 12:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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"Then at the end of 6 weeks we revisit the print-outs to assess how much more we understand (and whether we were correct the first time with our highlighting)."
This entire suggestion seems quite good. Maybe for the audio portion, we could record ourselves reading the article, if we have the equipment? Granted, the only problem is, if you're moving to a completely different language family -- I mean like, IE to Finno-Ugric here -- you're probably not going to recognize anything here, making this sort of moot. Going from Swedish to German though would definitely be a good idea to do this for though. Maybe for those other languages where doing this from the first day would be impossible, doing it after three weeks would work instead? Anyway, Knarvil, I might be interested in doing a Celtic language. Breton or Welsh could be interesting. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| andee Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6855 days ago 681 posts - 724 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Korean, French | Message 56 of 195 09 April 2007 at 1:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm afraid I'm going to withdraw... I wanted to focus on speaking skills with Japanese, but that's not going to work for me now since I had my jaw broken the other night. Speaking in English is something I'm trying avoid as well :P
Plus I'm still trying to get my hands on the materials I wanted to use. Ahh.. the difficulties of life. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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