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Total Annihilation - Volte | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 1 of 72 12 June 2007 at 7:57am | IP Logged | ||
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I'll 'seriously' start this challenge on the July 10th, hopefully. In the meanwhile, I've started dabbling. I've set the journal language to English, as I intend to do a lot of reading -about- languages, primarily in English, the log is in English, and no other language on my dropdown list makes more sense for it.
Yesterday, on top of an hour reading in Italian, and 20 minutes each of Assimil Persian, German, Italian, and Dutch (no French or Esperanto study - mea culpa!), I read a quick guide to Persian grammar online. Very unusually, I actually watched some TV (this is sometimes I do a handful of times a year); I spent perhaps a bit over an hour, and looked at a bit under a hundred channels, mainly in Arabic and Italian, but with some in Spanish, Chinese (I think Mandarin, but I'm not positive), Vietnamese, French, German etc. Happily, I even found one in Persian, although it seemed a bit odd culturally - there were quite a few pictures glorifying the American flag, Statue of Liberty, and an American passport. There were also a few channels with languages that I didn't manage to identify. Two surprises: I actually understood about as much Arabic as Persian (a few common words), although Persian sounds much more familiar to me, and I have a better idea of when I'm hearing grammatical markers and what they mean. Also, Vietnamese sounds fairly nice. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6246 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 2 of 72 12 June 2007 at 11:37am | IP Logged | ||
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I know you'll be one of the top contenders for the crown but I'll wish you good luck all the same :) I use TV a lot in my ahem "studies" and for Arabic I would imagine TV would help a lot with pronunciation, different dialects etc. What did you read in Italian? Do you look up all the words and write down all the vocabulary? It's too early for mea culpa as the challenge starts this Friday. Also you really have to do penance only for the days that you didn't do much but if it makes you happy... :)
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 72 12 June 2007 at 3:32pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you! I generally don't like using TV; I haven't even managed to make myself sit through much of 'French in Action' yet, and rarely watch videos, even on my PC. In general, I read, listen to radio and music, and to an extent chat with people, both in person orally, and online orally and in writing. I suspect TV would help a lot with Arabic; however, I'm not trying to pick it up right now. I'm only willing to do 'controlled' wanderlust during this challenge, in accordance with my goal of trying to get to fluency in the Swiss languages I'm studying and Esperanto, and a solid intermediate in the other two, before -seriously- picking up any others. Once I've done that, I intend to submerge myself rather heavily in Japanese; after that, I'll decide what I want to study next, and how - primary contenders are Russian, Finnish, Welsh, Latin, or trying to tackle the rest of the Germanic family, though I may choose something else. Yesterday, I read part of Christian Ponti's "Errore di Systema"; this is the second time I try approaching it. I made significantly better progress this time, but it still feels like I'm much better off leaving it for later; it's not an easy read. I'm trying to finish the books that I start, and I'm largely doing so, but I've still got a lot of improvement to make, so beating my head against books that are still quite difficult doesn't seem to be the most effective approach, as they'll naturally be much easier once I've read more. Today, I read an hour of "Come insegnare la lingua straniera: metodologia e didattica secondo i nuovi programmi della scuala elementare", which is nice in that I'm able to pick up some basic linguistic terms in Italian from it, and which is written in a rather clear style; I should finish it in another 2 days at this rate. I took Ardaschir's posts about a dictionary being a tool for an advanced learner, and even then, one to dip into sparingly, to heart; I'm not looking up unknown words for the most part. The major exception I'm making are for ones like "talvolta", "benchè", and "purché", connectives which are used quite often in Italian writing and rather rarely in speech, and which I've found I have a bit of trouble picking up from context. The rule I'm using is that if, after an hour of reading, the word is nagging at me, I look it up; this keeps the number of words I look up quite reasonable. I haven't read that many books in Italian; I kickstarted my current work with them a couple of months ago by reading a novel in English, then the Italian translation - as a consequence, I picked up quite a bit of vocabulary. I tried writing down all the vocabulary a few years ago, when I first started reading in Italian; I -hate- doing it. As I'm doing it now, I can manage about 40 pages an hour, and pick up a fair amount of vocabulary from context; when I first tried, it would literally take me an hour per page. Admittedly, my Italian has advanced quite a lot since then, but I've been quite put off the technique. I'm reading almost purely for 'quantity' and comfort reading quickly, although when I come across particularly unfamiliar structures, I stop and puzzle them out, albeit without using any reference material. For 'close reading', and more than that, close listening, for structure, I'm mainly using Assimil. As for the 'mea culpas' - a personal goal is to put in at least 20 minutes of each of the 6 languages I'm studying actively every day. It's extremely easy to pass a day reading about theory, or concentrating on only a few of the languages, but when I drop off for more than a few days, I can notice the effects, most pronouncedly in my weaker languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 72 12 June 2007 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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Unofficial pre-start total annihilation day 2.
I did the 3 hours that I seek to do every day (1 hour Italian reading, 20+ mins of Italian, German, French, Persian, Dutch, and Esperanto, with Assimil for all but the last, where I'm currently using Gerda Malaperis); I discussed the book I'm reading in the previous post. I've also done one step of controlled wanderlust: I listened to unilang's 'Sonidos del Mundo' in every language available, and for those with multiple speakers, to each speaker, to hear various languages. They were Afrikaans, Bulgarian, Catalonian, Czech, Danish, German, Greek, English, Esperanto, Finnish, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lao, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Mandarin, Malay, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovakian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, and Welsh. Surprises: Danish and Afrikaans were much more comprehensible to me than I'd expected; I could make out a bit of the Luxembourgish and Portuguese. The Spanish was fairly clear, except for the Andalusian, though this wasn't really a surprise. The Swedish and Norwegian were harder than the Danish; I'm not sure if this was an artifact of alphabetical ordering: my brain was significantly more tired by the time I got to them; by the 40 minute mark, I was quite fatigued. In terms of euphony, the results were also surprising. Welsh is stunningly beautiful, and the particular Greek clip there was also quite nice, though I haven't always liked the sound of Greek. Polish depends entirely on the accent; I've heard Poles speaking Polish here, and found it incredibly beautiful, as was one of the two Polish soundclips; I could not stand the other. Latvian and Russian were both ok; beyond that, I wasn't really fond of the Slavic languages. Of the languages I'm studying, I still prefer the sound of German, judging by those clips. I have a newfound appreciation of Italian though; I've never really considered it a beautiful language, but to my ear, it was among the nicer ones on this list. [In practice, my appreciation of the sounds of German, French, Dutch, and Esperanto vary widely with the accent, and to some degree, this is also true of Italian; with Persian, I haven't heard many accents yet.] Portuguese sounds to me like what Esperanto 'should' sound like; the nicest-sounding Esperanto I've heard has been that with a light Brazilian accent, which is probably where this association comes from. Esperanto also resembles Polish, but not as strongly. Lao and Thai sound somewhat similar, and quite familiar, as I used to listen to a lot of Thai streaming radio. Tagalog reminds me of my childhood; the clip that I heard was reminiscent of the Tagalog that I've been exposed to for much of my life, but didn't sound exactly the same. I then listened to 11 minutes of Kiswahili and 3 of Scottish Gaelic on BBC, and 15 of Irish; I was pretty neutral towards Kiswahili and Irish, and actively disliked Gaelic. The 'disappointments', for me, were Finnish and Kiswahili, as I'd heard from various sources that both were very beautiful, but I found them very neutral; neither ugly nor beautiful. The biggest positive surprise was Welsh; I'll listen to more from more sources, but I quite liked it. Last but not least, I've restarted reading "The Loom of Languages". Next experiments: 0) Listening to more Welsh and Irish to see if I continue to prefer Welsh so strongly, and a bit more Finnish to see if I can find some that I do like. 1) Finding out more about the major literary traditions of the world: which languages are the ones that I'm unfamiliar with associated with? Edited by Volte on 12 June 2007 at 7:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 5 of 72 13 June 2007 at 5:27pm | IP Logged | ||
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Unofficial pre-start total annihilation day 3.
Mundane day: 3 hours of studying, continuing from where I left off yesterday (1 hour Italian reading, 20 or so minutes per language). I also listened to a fair amount of Italian and Persian music; I'm mainly listening to only two songs in Persian, and I'm shadowing parts of the chorus at this point from memory. I'm unfortunately still illiterate in Persian. I made a little progress in Italian; clauses started by "la quale" suddenly sunk in when I was reading. I'd been sort-of familiar with them before, but it feels like I could almost start to actively use this structure now. Esperanto vocabulary keeps getting simpler for me to remember, especially short-term; I'm consistently getting more than half the words in Gerda Malaperis's vocabulary section right on the first try, and a large percent of the rest on the second, after briefly looking at the list, even though I'm doing English->Esperanto 'by typing' rather than with multiple choice. The nicest moment of the day was when I was chatting with a friend's girlfriend online, who I've occasionally talked to before, and she refused to believe that I was the one typing, because she thought my Italian was too good ("troppo perfetto"). It's nice to have external validation that I'm actually improving. I made a really silly mistake on the very next line, but even so! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 72 14 June 2007 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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Unofficial pre-start total annihilation, day 4.
Another mundane day. I finished reading the book on teaching foreign languages to elementary school children, and have started reading "L'isola del Tonal", which I believe is translated into Italian, for the sake of some variety. I also did 20+ minutes in each of the 6 languages I'm actively studying; the only noteworthy thing was that I finished Gerda Malaperis. It got easier as the end approached; between yesterday and today, I did lessons 22-25 and the (short) epilogue, averaging about ten minutes a lesson. I largely managed to understand, to shadow decently, and to answer the questions at the end of each lesson correctly, albeit with a couple of exceptions. I now need to find another Esperanto course; I really liked the format of Gerda Malaperis, but I still have some fairly large holes in my grammar, especially concerting compound tenses with participles, and I lack knowledge of quite a lot of the affixes. I'd also like to be more comfortable agglutinating. As per reineke's request for hardware information: Hardware: a few PCs all running Linux, speakers, headphones, and a generic portable mp3 player. Software: Linux, audacity, amarok (this is a great music player), mplayer, firefox, wget, shell and python scripting, mpg123, mpg321, etc. I use the mp3 player to listen to Italian music at various times during the day; I don't log it. I'm thinking of putting Persian music on it as well, and seeing if the constant switch between languages for hours on end is ok or not. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 72 15 June 2007 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I spoke for over an hour with Julie; it was mainly in English, but she was extremely helpful and patient with my German, from helping me pronounce words, to telling me how to say words and phrases, to correcting my mistakes - and not least, she kept trying to get me to speak in German, which was great of her. I spoke a few words of it with a native speaker at school today as well, but not very much.
I finished my first "onion" pass through Assimil Persian today. I listened to all the lessons, in blocks of 20-30 minutes at a time, generally not repeating lessons. I did not look at the book at all during this. The result is that Persian sounds more familiar. I also pick out the grammatical endings more, and the few words that I do know; I suspect that a few that I was consistently forgetting before, such as 'goft', will stick now when I do a passive pass. For Esperanto, I started "La Zagreba metodo". It has three levels of exercises for most of the grammatical points. I easily get 100% on the Level 1 ones, but am closer to 50% on the level 2 ones, and the Level 3 ones still evade me; this gives me something to work towards over the short term. I knew I was making systemic grammatical errors in some of the trickier cases, but this really underlined that. The extended grammatical explanations are purely in Esperanto; I didn't find them to be particularly easy reading, but I'll give them another try when I'm a bit more alert. Aside from that, it was essentially typical; I hit my usual 1 hour Italian reading + 20 mins/lang of actual study (as opposed to 'just' reading or listening native materials) target; as usual, I also did a fair amount of listening to Italian songs. Effortlessly understanding phrases that use both the conditional and subjunctive brings a surprising amount of joy to me, even though it's not a new experience; I wonder if it will fade when I learn to actively use the structure in conversation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6238 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 72 16 June 2007 at 5:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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I listened to about 3 hours of actual Persian today, by downloading shows 290 and 291 from persianradio.net, which contained a mixture of spoken language and songs, and the voices of people of all ages, which seems quite ideal to me.
I didn't understand any phrases, though I came close to understanding a couple; I did understand some words. This is a huge change from the other time I tried to listen to spoken Persian, during the 6 week challenge; I couldn't pick out any words then. Persian is starting to sound quite natural to me; word boundaries are largely clear, I recognize some of grammatical markers, and it's generally getting to the "it feels like I -should- understand this" point. Not too long after reaching that point in Dutch, I started to largely understand it (in limited contexts, such as each new lesson on the first or second listening, without looking at the book, with Assimil, or a simple Tintin movie); in languages with less cognates to ones I know, such as Japanese, I've been at that stage for years without really breaking through, though I haven't been effectively studying it (though I can pick out words and phrases sometimes). My Esperanto studies are slightly disheartening; I knew I was making systemic grammatical errors, but my current studies with La Zagreba Metodo are confirming it. I'm trying to do the level 1 and 2 exercises on this pass through it; the level 1 ones tend to go perfectly, or nearly so, while the level 2 ones give me a little difficulty. I'm largely unable to manage the level 3 ones. I only got through three sections of lesson 1 today, as I spent most of my study time reading through the extended grammatical explanations of the basic verb tenses (in Esperanto; these particular explanations were fairly easy to read). After this reading, the level 2 exercises were much more doable, though I still made a few mistakes. As a consequence, I've downgraded my status in my htlal profile for Esperanto to 'beginner', where it matches the other 2 languages I study (French and German) where I can sort of get by, read, understand spoken to some degree, but not speak well. Other than that, it was a mundane day language-wise; I hit my usual 3 hour target. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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