The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

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blaurebell
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby blaurebell » Wed Apr 05, 2017 9:17 am

Funny coincidence, we started watching this yesterday! I agree with your observations. The only thing that annoyed me a little was that the German background chatter was repeating the same sentences over and over. No mistakes in them at least and proper Germans, not stuff with Grammar mistakes - there is one episode in Ministerio del Tiempo where they had mistakes in every German sentence and not a single German actor. :roll:
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Atinkoriko
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Wed Apr 05, 2017 7:57 pm

Yeah, the chatter mostly featured of 'Schnell!' 'Los!' and a few other words. As you said, blaurebell, as least they bothered to use actual German actors.





Some more thoughts on wordlists.

Another 112 words and finally at the end of my '1000 new German verbs' mini campaign.


I've found that the very act of flipping through my small dictionary every day or so is building my vocabulary. This is because I seem to have memorized some words which I did not bother to put into my wordlists, just because I keep seeing them over and over again as I look through the dictionary.

I've also gotten quite a few grammar lessons, especially with regards to gender. For example, the words which end in -e, -heit, -ung etc are most likely going to be female. I tried to learn this a while ago by memorising the endings but it didn't go so well. Now that I've gone through hundreds of words with the gender indicative endings, that grammar lesson is practically unforgettable.

Similarly, the meanings of suffixes. For example, zer- is always associated with destruction of some sort, er- seems to signify a direct result coming about from the action of the verb ie erschlagen -to strike dead where schlagen - to hit, ertrinken - to drown where trinken- to drink etc

I also find that learning verbs makes it easier to grasp and learn nouns and adjectives, at least in German. For example, kitzeln - to tickle where der Kitzel - the tickle and kitzlig - ticklish, tauchen - to plug, dive where der Taucher - the diver etc


With regards to the 2nd repetition round, I usually find that I have trouble remembering the words which I do not subject to a second repetition round ie English to German. However, I sometimes go through old wordlists and I find that I don't have any problem remembering them, even if I pick them randomly.

Lastly, out of curiosity I did a small [and rather unscientific] experiment with a friend who has zero experience with language learning. I showed him how to do the wordlists, picked 7 words randomly from German, French and Italian and let him have a go at them. The only language he had some knowledge of was French but I made sure I picked non cognates for each of the languages.

He did all 7 , forgot one word in the first repetition round but remembered all 7 in the 2nd repetition round. Now he remembers a bunch of random words from languages he does not understand, but he remembers them nonetheless. So much for the 'you can only learn vocab from context' crowd.


Still a few thousand words to go if I hope to be done with German vocab study by the end of April.
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Atinkoriko
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Wed Apr 05, 2017 8:39 pm

Wow, this log has gotten 1000 views in less than 2 weeks.
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Atinkoriko
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Thu Apr 06, 2017 11:22 pm

Gotten virtually nothing done yesterday [the 6th] except watching French tv. That and some Glossika French.
Unexpectedly hard to get back into the Assimil schedule after the 3 day hiatus, but I'll make an extra effort to start it today.
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Fri Apr 07, 2017 2:41 am

I must say that the experience of trying to work through the first few units of Teach Yourself Ancient Greek has inspired in me a deep hatred for the idea of starting to learn a language with grammar translation. If I wasn't personally motivated to learn this language, I'd have given up a long time ago.


This is from Unit 2, where a small and simplified piece of the Odyssey is presented as reading material. These are the guidelines:

'In reading Greek the following steps should be followed:

a. Look up each word in the vocabulary and parse it (i.e define it grammatically; this is particularly necessary with words which vary in form)
b. Mark all finite verbs as this will indicate the number of clauses.
c. By observing punctuation and conjunctions used to join clauses, work out where each clause beings and ends.
d. Take each clause separately and see how each word relates to the finite verb of the clause (subject, object, part of an adverbial phrase, etc.)
e. See from the conjunctions how the clauses are related to each other and work out the meaning of the sentence.'





This is about as enjoyable as a trip to the dentist.
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Cavesa
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Cavesa » Fri Apr 07, 2017 9:05 am

Atinkoriko wrote:I must say that the experience of trying to work through the first few units of Teach Yourself Ancient Greek has inspired in me a deep hatred for the idea of starting to learn a language with grammar translation. If I wasn't personally motivated to learn this language, I'd have given up a long time ago.


This is from Unit 2, where a small and simplified piece of the Odyssey is presented as reading material. These are the guidelines:

'In reading Greek the following steps should be followed:

a. Look up each word in the vocabulary and parse it (i.e define it grammatically; this is particularly necessary with words which vary in form)
b. Mark all finite verbs as this will indicate the number of clauses.
c. By observing punctuation and conjunctions used to join clauses, work out where each clause beings and ends.
d. Take each clause separately and see how each word relates to the finite verb of the clause (subject, object, part of an adverbial phrase, etc.)
e. See from the conjunctions how the clauses are related to each other and work out the meaning of the sentence.'





This is about as enjoyable as a trip to the dentist.


:-D The trip to the dentist seems more enjoyable in comaprison, as it is more purposeful and that aleviates the stress and fear and the pain too. There have been studies on psychological means to reduce pain and the clear purpose, information about the process, and information about the estimated time till the end of the torture have been found efficient. I'm afraid the procedure above doesn't do any of it. the timeframe? Endless, no hint of hope like "this procedure will be needed for now, but don't worry, you'll improve". It is not that purposeful, as a dead language can be read as a living language and started with just a part of this process (my past experience with Latin. Had I sticked to the language, I could have been a fluent reader by now). And the information about the process is being given in a nausea giving fashion :-D Bon courage.

The sad thing is, that even "teachers" using the "communicative" method to something this, when using real life input in their classes of living languages.

Other than this, how are you finding Ancient Greek?
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Atinkoriko
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Fri Apr 07, 2017 10:05 am

Apart from my hours wasted with Teach Yourself, it isn't going too badly Cavesa. It really is a language worth the pain, as there's the feeling of antiquity about it that makes it a pleasure to study. I also love those 'aha' moments when I find out that a certain English word has its roots in Greek ie cinema, angel, polemic, orator etc


I've done two lessons of Assimil's Le Grec Ancien now, learning far more than I did in those units of Teach Yourself, and I'm supplementing the lessons with this series of 118 lessons presented by Leonard Muller (Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies at Brandeis University) and Belisi Gillepsei:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGNAwyi ... pwrkURbLjT


Nothing groundbreaking about the lessons but each grammar concept is treated in a separate video, which is rather useful as a supplement to Assimil.
In all, I'm trying my best to enjoy the experience as that's the point of dabbling anyways :D
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Atinkoriko
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Fri Apr 07, 2017 11:05 am

Trying to read 'Reading Greek' and 'Athenaze' while screaming internally for a bilingual format. The small vocab notes at the bottom do absolutely nothing for me, especially in a book that attempts to teach intuitively. That approach works perfectly fine with the Lingua Latina series because of the similarity between English/Romance languages and Latin. In a language like Ancient Greek with fewer similarities and a different alphabet to boot, it isn't as intuitive as they'd like to think it is.


UPDATE: Okay, after some work I have managed to turn my Reading Greek lesson for the day into a bilingual Assimil type format, with my own vocab and grammar notes at the bottom. All handwritten into a notebook. Thus if I want to review a lesson I simply turn to my own notes and ignore the book entirely, saving me some stress.
I know I must have mentioned this before, but I'm quite disappointed at the quality of beginner materials for new students of Ancient Greek. Needs must when the devil drives, it seems. Grammar translation it is.
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Atinkoriko
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Fri Apr 07, 2017 11:21 pm

Okay, life is intervening and some things must be cut.

Assimil Business French and Perfectionnement Allemand have to go for now. They easily take up hours of my time since they're so long. The With Ease courses [active waves] remain, but are de prioritized and not part of core study time. Latin and Greek will be dabbled in interchangeably when bored.

Prioritised:
German wordlisting/conversation on HelloTalk and Speaky
French half SC [Film]/Remaining units of FSI French Phonology/Glossika Level 1
Spanish with Toil

Wew, that's much better.
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Re: The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

Postby Atinkoriko » Sat Apr 08, 2017 6:58 pm

30 h of French films/videos clocked, 45h to go.

I expect to be done with this Half SC by the end of April, and I'm already seeing improvements in my listening comprehension. Then I'll finish the German one and focus on getting my page count up, as well as listening to audiobooks wherever I can find them.



This June will mark the end of the first year of language learning for me. Woo! I just realised that I have accomplished far more than I had hoped for, as at the start of the year I only just wanted to study German and try my damndest to get to B1. German looked so daunting at the time that I was tempted to give up at the A1/A2 stage so many times. :lol:

Immer weiter!





''I will work harder''

Comrade Boxer, Animal Farm.
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