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

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
Atinkoriko
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:31 pm
Location: England
Languages: English (N)
Ibibio (N)
West African Pidgin English/Guinea Coast Creole[N]
Actively learning
Int: German, French, Spanish

Beginner: Russian, Japanese

Next: Mandarin Chinese, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 6&start=20
x 398

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

Postby Atinkoriko » Fri Mar 24, 2017 12:03 pm

So an update.

Woke up and set about lesson 1 of Assimil Business French.

Verdict: My mouth hurts. I have about 100 hours of shadowing under my belt with German but nothing prepared me for this. After shadowing blind 10 times for 30 minutes, I had to sit down and go through the lesson line by line, taking each sentence and builiding it from the last syllable until I could finally rattle it off at light speed. This was rather frustrating, I must say. I formerly thought my prosody was good, but not good enough for light speed French apparently. I felt myself stumbling over tiny sounds and stretching my mouth in ways I'd not thought possible before.

However, comprehension jumped massively after this ordeal and I was then able to hear each word quite distinctly, even at light speed.
After spending about another 30 minutes on the lesson, I read the English part, shadowed along and did 3 more rounds of shadowing.
I feel in a sort of daze right now due to so much input but it'll settle.

Reading the other stuff was really easy ie a letter etc, and I didn't bother with the exercises for now. I think I'll fashion some sort of active wave , perhaps at lesson 25 where I'll double back and do Scriptorium as well as answer the exercises.

For now I'll just concentrate on comprehension and pronunciation/prosody, but I'll go back to the lesson and copy it down later this night. The act of writing should help to consolidate the lesson better, or so I hope.

In all, a good program which I will stick to. My head is buzzing and I really have to do Uni work now. Tschüss!





EDIT: Also shadowed a random lesson of Using French. Found it laughably slow and clear in comparison. Business French was definitely the right choice
1 x
: 50 / 2000 Remembering the Kanji :
: 33 / 75 SpanishFilms Half SC :
: 45 / 124 German Active wave :
: 3 / 100 Assimil Japanese :
: 33 / 100 Russian without Toil :
: 160 / 10000 Russian 10k srs :

User avatar
blaurebell
Blue Belt
Posts: 840
Joined: Thu Jul 28, 2016 1:24 pm
Location: Spain
Languages: German (N), English (C2), Spanish (B2-C1), French (B2+ passive), Italian (A2), Russian (Beginner)
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3235
x 2240

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

Postby blaurebell » Fri Mar 24, 2017 12:18 pm

Atinkoriko wrote:Benny had a massive influence on me at the time and I thought B2 in 3 months was really possible. I tried extremely valiantly but failed, but I'm glad I tried nevertheless.


If it hadn't been German but Spanish you probably would have succeeded with the B2 in 3months, at least passive. German is just a tad too difficult for a 3month push. I read 5000pages in French intensively in 3 months, starting French from scratch, and reached B2 passive at least. It might actually be a little beyond that with reading comprehension, since my Spanish comprehension is at B2+ according to my old language school and I have more precision with French. If I hadn't ditched all courses after 6 weeks because they were too easy, I probably would have reached a low B2 active too. It would have hurt my progress though because speaking too early usually carves in some pretty annoying mistakes. I started Spanish Benny style with a full immersion program and now I have all these silly beginner mistakes that want to tumble out of my mouth because I repeated them too often in the early days :evil: It's no wonder that nobody at that school managed to push beyond B2 even after a year despite full immersion. Every one of use would have needed a good double dose of FSI boot camp to kill those early mistakes! Never again! Basically Benny's method is a good recipe to stay at B2 forever :roll:

Atinkoriko wrote:16h of productive work. Wow, that's a lot. Only managed about 14 h for 1 week and a half, and that was because I was trying to read an entire semester's worth of Equity Law in just 10 days. Was successful but it wasn't a pretty sight. Sadly, it seemed I'm destined for the same thing this year so I'll have to cut out the afternoon language dabbling and restrict study only to my 6-9 am/11-2 am block.


Yeah well, my Masters was basically an exercise of pushing a 2 year 50h week program into a 1 year 80h a week program. Simply not doable! The wonderful feeling of trying to drink from a water cannon. The program coordinator said on our first day: "This will be the hardest year of your life, but you're going to love it anyway!" I finished half of it part-time in the end because my health was too precarious for a year of 16h days. I mean seriously, one of the guys had a sleeping bag stashed away in the lab! Golden days and a transformative experience, but it was mental ...! My bachelor degree was a toddler's playgroup in comparison.
1 x
: 20 / 100 Дэвид Эддингс - В поисках камня
: 14325 / 35000 LWT Known

: 17 / 55 FSI Spanish Basic
: 100 / 116 GdUdE B
: 8 / 72 Duolingo reverse Spanish -> German

Atinkoriko
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:31 pm
Location: England
Languages: English (N)
Ibibio (N)
West African Pidgin English/Guinea Coast Creole[N]
Actively learning
Int: German, French, Spanish

Beginner: Russian, Japanese

Next: Mandarin Chinese, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 6&start=20
x 398

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

Postby Atinkoriko » Fri Mar 24, 2017 12:49 pm

blaurebell wrote:
Atinkoriko wrote:Benny had a massive influence on me at the time and I thought B2 in 3 months was really possible. I tried extremely valiantly but failed, but I'm glad I tried nevertheless.


If it hadn't been German but Spanish you probably would have succeeded with the B2 in 3months, at least passive. German is just a tad too difficult for a 3month push. I read 5000pages in French intensively in 3 months, starting French from scratch, and reached B2 passive at least. It might actually be a little beyond that with reading comprehension, since my Spanish comprehension is at B2+ according to my old language school and I have more precision with French. If I hadn't ditched all courses after 6 weeks because they were too easy, I probably would have reached a low B2 active too. It would have hurt my progress though because speaking too early usually carves in some pretty annoying mistakes. I started Spanish Benny style with a full immersion program and now I have all these silly beginner mistakes that want to tumble out of my mouth because I repeated them too often in the early days :evil: It's no wonder that nobody at that school managed to push beyond B2 even after a year despite full immersion. Every one of use would have needed a good double dose of FSI boot camp to kill those early mistakes! Never again! Basically Benny's method is a good recipe to stay at B2 forever :roll:

Atinkoriko wrote:16h of productive work. Wow, that's a lot. Only managed about 14 h for 1 week and a half, and that was because I was trying to read an entire semester's worth of Equity Law in just 10 days. Was successful but it wasn't a pretty sight. Sadly, it seemed I'm destined for the same thing this year so I'll have to cut out the afternoon language dabbling and restrict study only to my 6-9 am/11-2 am block.


Yeah well, my Masters was basically an exercise of pushing a 2 year 50h week program into a 1 year 80h a week program. Simply not doable! The wonderful feeling of trying to drink from a water cannon. The program coordinator said on our first day: "This will be the hardest year of your life, but you're going to love it anyway!" I finished half of it part-time in the end because my health was too precarious for a year of 16h days. I mean seriously, one of the guys had a sleeping bag stashed away in the lab! Golden days and a transformative experience, but it was mental ...! My bachelor degree was a toddler's playgroup in comparison.



Sheesh, sleeping bag. It's certainly not that bad for me.

Yeah, the speak from day 1 thing is rather dubious to me. With German, there were far too many opportunities to make grammar mistakes. I'm glad I waited. One day, I woke up and full sentences just appeared in my head. Still not as easily as I'd like due to a few tiny grammar issues and insufficient vocab for proper expression, but a milestone for me was when I had a 1 hour conversation with two of my German speaking friends completely in German. Will finish my SC for German, then set out on the aforementioned FSI boot camp. Yay, back to inquiring after the American Embassy. Can hardly wait.



5,000 pages of intensive reading in 3 months. Damn, that's great
3 x
: 50 / 2000 Remembering the Kanji :
: 33 / 75 SpanishFilms Half SC :
: 45 / 124 German Active wave :
: 3 / 100 Assimil Japanese :
: 33 / 100 Russian without Toil :
: 160 / 10000 Russian 10k srs :

Atinkoriko
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:31 pm
Location: England
Languages: English (N)
Ibibio (N)
West African Pidgin English/Guinea Coast Creole[N]
Actively learning
Int: German, French, Spanish

Beginner: Russian, Japanese

Next: Mandarin Chinese, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 6&start=20
x 398

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

Postby Atinkoriko » Fri Mar 24, 2017 7:34 pm

Alright, written out the entire lesson for today by hand after listening to the tape once again. Not as rigorous as Scriptorium but comprehension is almost maxed out except for a few really quick 'liasoned' sounds.

Bof, n'importe quoi.

Was wondering whether Business French was the right choice since I've not done Using French yet but then I remembered the title of this log.

It's 'Overly Ambitious' goddamnit ! Not tentatively ambitious or boldly cautious or [insert something here] :D

So I've decided to do the two courses together, in keeping true to the spirit of this log.

Sorry German, but I think I'll just focus on completing the SC for you. All future desk work will be for Spanish and French now.

It's on, French!


EDIT: Also, I've been doing the active wave of French with Ease quite slowly indeed but I intend to finish it all the way.

Whew, what a schedule.
1 x
: 50 / 2000 Remembering the Kanji :
: 33 / 75 SpanishFilms Half SC :
: 45 / 124 German Active wave :
: 3 / 100 Assimil Japanese :
: 33 / 100 Russian without Toil :
: 160 / 10000 Russian 10k srs :

Atinkoriko
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:31 pm
Location: England
Languages: English (N)
Ibibio (N)
West African Pidgin English/Guinea Coast Creole[N]
Actively learning
Int: German, French, Spanish

Beginner: Russian, Japanese

Next: Mandarin Chinese, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 6&start=20
x 398

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

Postby Atinkoriko » Sat Mar 25, 2017 2:05 am

Okay, small update.

Finished 7th week of Assimil Spanish without toil ie lesson 35 etc.

Really enjoying it, most especially the connected storyline. One of the funniest parts was in one of the exercises in lesson 32 (I think) which featured two fictional readers having a discussion how they were sick of the author focusing on Dona Amelia and her travelling partner, and how they wanted to get [with the central figure] to Madrid as quickly as possible.

The songs are simply great, just great.


Decided to drop Using French and focus on only Business French [and the active wave of With Ease], and replace Using French with my yet unfinished German with Ease. Yikes, my 6 hour study block is now composed almost entirely of SC, Assimil and Pimsleur.

Oh well, I do want to finish them all once and for all. I just finished reading the massive 'Assimil Experiment Log' on the former site and it redoubled my interest to finish all the ones I have AND DO THE ACTIVE WAVES.

Ironically, when I set out I had the Benny 'C1 in 3 months' delusion and I was obsessed with the 'fastest' methods to learn a language. Now, I just want to be thorough and avoid fossilizing/getting rid of any fossilized errors.

Indeed I have learnt the error of my ways :)
3 x
: 50 / 2000 Remembering the Kanji :
: 33 / 75 SpanishFilms Half SC :
: 45 / 124 German Active wave :
: 3 / 100 Assimil Japanese :
: 33 / 100 Russian without Toil :
: 160 / 10000 Russian 10k srs :

Atinkoriko
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:31 pm
Location: England
Languages: English (N)
Ibibio (N)
West African Pidgin English/Guinea Coast Creole[N]
Actively learning
Int: German, French, Spanish

Beginner: Russian, Japanese

Next: Mandarin Chinese, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 6&start=20
x 398

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

Postby Atinkoriko » Sat Mar 25, 2017 8:20 pm

Okay, good news.

Business French seems to fit right into my schedule.

First, 10 minutes with German with Ease active wave. Tempted to do more than 1 a day but it's more difficult to procrastinate when I know it's just going to be one. I think this will fix my problem with writing. Made a few case errors and had a few AHA moments during the corrections. Resolved never to skip an Assimil active wave ever again.

2nd, another 10 minutes with French with Ease active wave. One a day and it's actually much easier than I expected. I don't do much by way of production in French so this is a nice way to ease me into it.

Then Business French, which really doesn't hurt as much to shadow anymore. I think I'm getting used to the speed. As always, I reviewed yesterday's lesson and could hear practically every word in the blitzkrieg of sounds. Rather encouraging. I'm slightly worried that my shadowing of Business French will lead me to pick up some 'undesirable accents' as I read in a log somewhere that the course introduces, in later lessons, some characters with badly accented French. Anyway, c'est rien.



As always, I'm not entirely comfortable with being comfortable so I've decided to throw Perfectionnement Allemand into the mix. That's 5 Assimil courses now, but for only three languages.

French
Business French [moderately intense - write out lesson by hand when I can]
With Ease [active wave]

Spanish
Without Toil [intense shadowing + scriptorium]

German
With Ease [active wave]
Perfectionnement Allemand [light shadowing and type out the lessons, including the grammar notes]

By the way, for Perfectionnement Allemand I do the lessons with the French base but simultaneously translate the French to English as I type out the lesson. I find that typing out the grammar notes really helps me to pay attention to them. The French base is rather idiomatic and a bit frustrating sometimes but I manage.



I wonder how many people are reading this out of curiosity just to see if I'll succumb under the load and crash, especially when the lessons get longer and more difficult. :lol:
2 x
: 50 / 2000 Remembering the Kanji :
: 33 / 75 SpanishFilms Half SC :
: 45 / 124 German Active wave :
: 3 / 100 Assimil Japanese :
: 33 / 100 Russian without Toil :
: 160 / 10000 Russian 10k srs :

User avatar
Teango
Blue Belt
Posts: 766
Joined: Mon Jul 06, 2015 4:55 am
Location: Honolulu, Hawaiʻi
Languages: en (n)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 9&p=235545
x 2943
Contact:

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

Postby Teango » Sat Mar 25, 2017 8:49 pm

A warm welcome to the forum, Atinkoriko! And good luck progressing in all your languages this year (perhaps you'll pick up Russian at a later stage when the groundhog sees all the excellent shadowing you're doing). ;)
2 x

Atinkoriko
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:31 pm
Location: England
Languages: English (N)
Ibibio (N)
West African Pidgin English/Guinea Coast Creole[N]
Actively learning
Int: German, French, Spanish

Beginner: Russian, Japanese

Next: Mandarin Chinese, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 6&start=20
x 398

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

Postby Atinkoriko » Sat Mar 25, 2017 9:43 pm

Teango wrote:A warm welcome to the forum, Atinkoriko! And good luck progressing in all your languages this year (perhaps you'll pick up Russian at a later stage when the groundhog sees all the excellent shadowing you're doing). ;)



Thank you :D
0 x
: 50 / 2000 Remembering the Kanji :
: 33 / 75 SpanishFilms Half SC :
: 45 / 124 German Active wave :
: 3 / 100 Assimil Japanese :
: 33 / 100 Russian without Toil :
: 160 / 10000 Russian 10k srs :

Atinkoriko
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:31 pm
Location: England
Languages: English (N)
Ibibio (N)
West African Pidgin English/Guinea Coast Creole[N]
Actively learning
Int: German, French, Spanish

Beginner: Russian, Japanese

Next: Mandarin Chinese, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 6&start=20
x 398

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

Postby Atinkoriko » Sun Mar 26, 2017 8:23 am

More active wave today for German and French.

Some thoughts. It seems quite strange to say so now, especially considering my earlier impatience to 'get over' with Assimil , but I have to say that I'm rather glad that I delayed the active wave till now. There are tiny details that I simply overlooked then, even with a rather intense shadowing routine - which included reviewing the previous 6 lessons every time I added a new one. In my hunger for comprehension as soon as possible, I doubt that I'd have noticed these tiny details or recognised their significance if I had done the active wave at the barely A1 level that 50 passive waves of Assimil gets you to

For example, did the active wave lesson for lesson 18 of German with Ease today. Apparently, 'nun mal' is used when the speaker of the sentence knows he's doing something wrong but protests nonetheless [In this case, a woman begging to be allowed to park illegally]. I must have read 'nun mal' thousands of times without actually attaching any significance to it. If I had done this active wave just fresh out of approximately 68 lessons of Assimil, still thirsty for comprehension, I probably would have overlooked it.

This is just one example, but I'm sure that there are many others to come by the time I finish this active wave.

I now see what Professor Arguelles meant when he said that he returns to his books periodically ie reading the lessons over and over again, doing Scriptorium, typing the lessons out etc, essentially going through the books with a fine comb. I do somewhat believe that if one has the patience and dedication to internalise this book thoroughly, as well the more advanced versions, one could be within reach of a rather good level which can then be achieved with a good deal of native input.

Assimil's claim of B2 or C1 [Using series] may not be true when based only on their '30 minutes of casual studying a day' but could possibly be true if one deliberately 'overlearns' the book [barring vocab and listening comprehension].


It think it goes without saying that, if I wasn't an Assimil fan before, I certainly am one now

On y va!
3 x
: 50 / 2000 Remembering the Kanji :
: 33 / 75 SpanishFilms Half SC :
: 45 / 124 German Active wave :
: 3 / 100 Assimil Japanese :
: 33 / 100 Russian without Toil :
: 160 / 10000 Russian 10k srs :

Atinkoriko
Orange Belt
Posts: 202
Joined: Sun Mar 05, 2017 9:31 pm
Location: England
Languages: English (N)
Ibibio (N)
West African Pidgin English/Guinea Coast Creole[N]
Actively learning
Int: German, French, Spanish

Beginner: Russian, Japanese

Next: Mandarin Chinese, Ancient Greek, Latin, Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Italian
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 6&start=20
x 398

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

Postby Atinkoriko » Sun Mar 26, 2017 8:42 am

Also feeling incredible wanderlust over either Ancient Greek or Egyptian Hieroglyphics, having just finished reading the 'Assimil Challenge for 6 languages' log by Vermilion on the old HTLAL site. Also, reading emk's log doesn't help the wanderlust either.

I have to stay focused. Completing my Assimil and SC plans may lead to a breakthrough in 3 languages, a very welcome one indeed as my first year of language learning draws to a close by June.

How do you guys deal with wanderlust? Tips needed :D
0 x
: 50 / 2000 Remembering the Kanji :
: 33 / 75 SpanishFilms Half SC :
: 45 / 124 German Active wave :
: 3 / 100 Assimil Japanese :
: 33 / 100 Russian without Toil :
: 160 / 10000 Russian 10k srs :


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: iguanamon and 2 guests