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Reineke’s Great Summer Challenge (TA) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6245 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes  Studies: German | Message 1 of 23 13 June 2007 at 7:59pm | IP Logged |
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Welcome to Reineke's Great Summer Challenge (Extreme)
Between June 15 and September 30 2007 I intend to do a lot of studying. Considering my procrastinating ways even a small effort would be a 100 percent increase in productivity but I'll try to make it the most productive summer ever. Target Languages: Learning from scratch: Japanese Prior knowledge: 2 weeks of intensive study - therefore almost nil. Spanish No prior knowledge or study. For related languages please see below. I will start with Pimsleur. Brushing up and improving on: Italian I will likely do a bit of everything here. French The same as with Italian but I might actually try to finish that Mauger course. German I will start with some easy listening and later we'll see Of the three Italian is the strongest and German the weakest. I have spent a lot of time on and off studying these and I've studied Italian since I was a wee little bairn. I can watch movies and read moderately difficult texts in German. Since I haven't done much reading in German (ever, sigh) any attempt at reading in that language feels like a major effort. That's rather unfortunate as one of my "plans" has been to read a lot in this language. Exploratory: Russian? Heaven help me. Hardware: Two computers hooked to 2 TVs, a 400 DVD changer, one 1TB external hard disk drive, one Zen Creative Vision M (or whatever) 30GB player, Sennheiser wireless earphones that I will most likely tape to the back of my skull for the duration of the challenge. I'd like to hear from others regarding their use of hardware in language learning. Hopefully I will not prove that fancy gadgets do not a language learner make. Textbooks, courses etc. too many to number and I'll mention them when I actually get to them. August 5, 2008 Edit: this log has moved here Edited by reineke on 12 December 2008 at 1:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6245 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 2 of 23 18 June 2007 at 12:33pm | IP Logged |
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A short update, a very busy weekend (not necessarily language-wise). I managed to do 6 lessons of Japanese, 3 of Russian (Pimsleur), I did a fairly decent amount of reading in German (which felt exhausting), I saw some documentaries in German as well, and I spent some time on Italian message boards. I received a couple of rather indirect and therefore very pleasing compliments. One was in the form of a question - whether I was an Italian studying in the US on the Erasmus program. That felt good, although I'm afraid I abused my Italian too much lately. I feel guilty about my French as well. Am I doing the right thing in tackling Japanese right now? Maybe I should devote my attention to other languages first and reward myself with Japanese last. I didn't get to do any French :(
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| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6245 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 3 of 23 23 June 2007 at 1:29pm | IP Logged |
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Well, that was that :) Anyway, a few updates on my exploits.
Installed Screamer Internet radio tuner. It comes with a whole lot of preset stations - especially for European languages but you can also find things like Persian pop and "dance party". It's worth checking out. I love it so far as it's simple and does not come with any bloatware. Another one is XStream radio but this one is mostly music and it does not come with so many stations. Incidentally, while adding stations to my favorites list (a rather long process) I discovered a Russian audiobook station. My willingness to learn the language instantly jumped 30%. Installed foobar2000 player. Very efficient and plays anything you throw at it. Installed the Korean KMPlayer. Very sleek and efficient. The default setting was in Korean and that was a shock initially. Gasp! Installed Mnemosyne. Still trying to figure out the best approach to organize my learning through that little program. Bought even more language materials. Wife was so glad. During the past few months she has been glued to Chinese TV. Daughter has been watching Chinese cartoons and listening to Chinese music. They have soundly trounced me in the number of hours "studied". Organizing and planning my study course. From next week on I will have a lot of free time and I intend to use it. The past few days were uneventful. I listened to Italian radio and I continued with my (still) painful German reading. I also listened to some French. French and German feel a little squeaky. Italian does not. It will be interesting to see what's the best way to brush up on these languages. Mea culpa - I did not study in the spirit of the challenge. I could have done more. I will not count what I've done so far as serious study. I have done a lot of reading on Krashen. His initial idea on the silent period was some 10-12 hours. Certain proponents of this method now talk about 600-800 hours. FSI can bring a student up to level III proficiency in a level I difficulty language in about 600 hours. Now, how best to structure a "silent" 600 hour period? How well would this compare to FSI's 600 hours? I'd like to find out if Krashen changed his mind in the meantime. I also read about a study where a group of students exposed to comprehensible input for 20 hours had better comprehension than students who studied for 100 hours using other methods. This means that comprehensible input is very useful even if used for short learning stretches and one does not need to be exposed to megadoses of input to start seeing results. A few things I cannot get out of my thick head. One is that you do not need grammar books. I did learn Italian this way, and I am a "believer" but later I also found formal grammar study rather beneficial. Krashen maintains that one can use grammar books as an ordinary course material - it does not hurt or help according to him and if it's beneficial it's more of a placebo effect. I will use grammar books in several ways. I will come back to that later. The din effect. Krashen's din. I like the phrase and I think I know exactly what it means but I want to read on it a little bit more. Now, my specific problem is how to costruct an enjoyable (or tollerable) and efficient course based on some the elements of comprehensible input method and a few of my own ideas. Efficient is the key word here as I can certainly mimic how I learned Italian and (to some extent) English but I'm afraid that would put the final nail in the coffin of my dreams of polyglottery. I first need to understand Krashen and his critics better as I have yawned through all my classes on the theory and methodics of teaching foreign languages. Yawn. Before I forget - again I'd like to thank Talairan for helping me with the missing two lessons of Takeoff in Japanese. It has helped me appreciate this site and its users much better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6245 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 4 of 23 30 June 2007 at 11:12am | IP Logged |
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Listened to most of Takeoff in German in one sitting. Yawn. Bought it on impulse a while back together with Rosenberg's German, How to speak and write it thinking that I "must" finish some sort of a formal course. Boy, was that boring and it's one of the more interesting courses out there. I like the Japanese version better. I also like Rosenberg's book and all the illustrations. Edited by reineke on 30 June 2007 at 7:20pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6245 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 23 30 June 2007 at 7:20pm | IP Logged |
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Finished with Takeoff, listened to the last cd several times while shopping. That was not a very wise purchase. At least I have an idea about the course as I have an identical one for Japanese. Way to go, leaving us hanging about Susanne und Hubert! Bought some new books:
La telarana de Carlota Harry potter y la Orden del Fenix Las Cronicas de Narnia El libro de la Selva Mi vida de Bill Clinton (don't ask) and Don Quijote de la Mancha I already have a couple of Potter books in German. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6245 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 6 of 23 01 July 2007 at 12:11pm | IP Logged |
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Changed whatever I was able to easily change to Spanish on my computer and the "Zen" (let's call it ipod from now on). A few settings did not go into effect. I'm not gonna spend half a day trying to figure it out. Changed the homepage to Spanish Wikipedia. Doing a little more "soulsearching" (see the "Global competitiveness" thread). Listening to Pimsleur and queing up a lot of Spanish DVDs.
Sigh... Taking a deep, zen breath. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6245 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 7 of 23 01 July 2007 at 10:33pm | IP Logged |
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Pimsleur 1-10 in one sitting.
Oxford wordpack 1-5 Topcat in Spanish (a few episodes) Spongebob Squarepants Some 8 hours of Spanish today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6245 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 8 of 23 03 July 2007 at 9:49am | IP Logged |
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For yesterday:
Pimsleur 11-20 I had to restart no. 20 several times. Not because it was difficult, but because I had totally zoned out. I'll add more variety. Some vocabulary work. Maybe some 6 hours of Spanish. I think I'm finally in the learning mode. I'm glad I had to dig deep for my learning log. I'm happy so many people are writing log entries as well. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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