Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, Italian, and Ancient Greek

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philomath
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Sun Aug 29, 2021 4:11 am

French
26Aug21: I listened to another episode of Transfert.

28Aug21: I stumbled across a livestream by one of the French YouTubers I like, Christelle Lebailly. Before the livestream officially started, there were lots of people chatting in French in the comments. I had a lot of fun reading all of the comments, though I was too shy to write one of my own.

I also practiced speaking by myself for 10 minutes. I think I should record myself sometime to make the practice feel more official, but I was too lazy this time.

German
26Aug21: I went to the Boston Public Library and borrowed two books: Easy German Step-by-Step and German Made Simple.

28Aug21: First, I did Pimsleur Lesson 12, and then I had my first iTalki lesson in German! It went okay. Pros: The teacher was very nice and agreed that learning through conversation is better than doing grammar drills. She also said a lot of things in German and wrote everything down for me. Cons: She spent too much time giving me advice on how to German, and she didn't seem very prepared to teach someone who is such a beginner.

Overall, I'm glad I did the lesson. The first lesson in a new language is always so nerve-wracking, and now I've gotten that over with for German! I learned some new phrases, and she said I was pronouncing the voiceless palatal fricative correctly, which was nice to hear. I think I'll learn more on my own before scheduling another lesson, and I'll probably try another teacher.

I’m starting to really enjoy German, but I still have this nagging feeling that I’m wasting my time on it. Although I’m interested in traveling to Germany, I’m much more drawn to Italy, Greece, etc. Today I started daydreaming about traveling to Italy and felt sad that I haven’t been learning Italian. But not sad enough to drop German. I want to at least get to the stage where I can learn German from watching TV shows and reading books.
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philomath
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Mon Aug 30, 2021 3:43 am

French
29Aug21: I recorded myself speaking for 5 minutes and wrote a short paragraph on the same topic. From now on, I'm going to keep a list of the topics that I cover so I don't repeat the same ones over and over. I also made some flashcards from words I found in Les fiancés de l'hiver.

German
29Aug21: I finished Chapter 1 of Mango Languages. Next, I wrote another paragraph in German. It was pretty similar to the paragraph I wrote the other day, but I think repetition is helpful at this stage. So far, I really enjoy writing in German and trying to piece the language together as I go, using DeepL. My writing process goes something like this:
  • I decide what I want to say. For example, "My boyfriend used to live in Berlin."
  • If I don't know all of the nouns, I look those up first. In this case, I already knew that "the boyfriend" = "der Freund" so "my boyfriend" is "mein Freund".
  • I look up the subject and the verb in the present tense. E.g., "my boyfriend lives" = "mein Freund lebt".
  • Now I start looking up variations of that phrase, increasing the complexity as I go. For example "my boyfriend lives" ("mein Freund lebt") --> "my boyfriend lived" ("mein Freund lebte") --> "my boyfriend used to live" ("mein Freund lebte früher"). I write all of these down in my notebook.
  • Next, I look up the whole sentence I wanted to write. "My boyfriend used to live in Berlin." = "Mein Freund hat früher in Berlin gelebt." Here I take note of the word order and any changes that I wasn't expecting, like the fact that DeepL used "hat gelebt" instead of just "lebte".
  • I try making different variations of that sentence by myself, and then I post everything on iTalki to make sure it's correct.

Am I relying too much on DeepL? Perhaps, but it sure is fun! And I think it's all right as long as I'm getting corrections from native speakers.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Wed Sep 01, 2021 12:42 am

It's time for my August 2021 recap! This is the cumulative time I spent on each language:


And these are the activities I did for each language:






Overall I'm really happy with my language progress this month. I spent almost 40 hours on languages, and I did a wider variety of activities for each one. Next month I want to do more speaking and writing. I also want to spend more time on German and start enjoying native content.
Last edited by philomath on Mon Nov 01, 2021 10:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Thu Sep 02, 2021 2:27 am

French
30Aug21: I practiced speaking French for 10 minutes while recording myself. This time I talked about something that happened at work. I also wrote a paragraph on the same topic, but I didn't post it on iTalki since it was about my work.

31Aug21: I listened to another episode of Transfert. I kept replaying parts that I didn't hear well or understand well. I also wrote down some words I learned: "accoucher", "copain de fac", "le vestiaire", etc.

01Sep21: I listened to the same episode of Transfert as the day before, but this time I downloaded the subtitles and read along as I listened. I learned a lot more words that way, but it got a little bit tedious.

German
30Aug21: I did a few more lessons from Mango Languages. These lessons went over how to say things like "Du sprichst Spanisch." I already knew how to say that, but it was good pronunciation practice repeating after the recordings. I'm still having trouble with the voiceless palatal fricative in words like sprichst.

01Sep21: I watched a German documentary called "Shiny_Flakes: The Teenage Drug Lord". It looks like there's a TV show based on it, and I need a German show to watch. For the documentary, I listened to the German audio while reading the English subs. It was fun being able to pick out words that I recognized. I also tried to pay attention to the speakers' mouth posture and pronunciation. I really enjoy the way German sounds.

I also did Pimsleur Lesson 13 and Lesson 14. I think it was a bad idea though, because I was really tired. So tired that I had trouble pronouncing some of the sentences correctly, and that made me really grumpy. I hate how difficult I'm finding German pronunciation! It makes me feel like I'm terrible at learning languages. Today I kept accidentally making a uvular trill when I was supposed to be making a velar fricative. Relaxing my tongue too much maybe? I'm worried that I will burn out if I keep worrying about my pronunciation so much.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Mon Sep 06, 2021 7:13 pm

French
02Sep21: I finished reading Chapter 2 of Les fiancés de l’hiver. Then I listened to the audiobook recording for Chapters 1 and 2 while reading along. Together, the two chapters were 43 minutes long.

04Sep21: I practiced speaking for 15 minutes. The topic was my boyfriend’s friends visiting for the weekend. I felt very rusty—I definitely need to practice speaking more! I think writing more would also help.

German
02Sep21: I discovered a podcast called "Slow German mit Annik Rubens" which has transcripts for each episode. First I picked one of the episodes and read the transcript, looking up all of the unknown words. I learned a lot of really useful verbs, like müssen and wissen. Then I listened to the episode while reading the transcript again. It was fun but very time-consuming. Afterward, I realized that the podcast has a YouTube channel as well. Next time, I think I'll watch one of the videos using the Language Reactor extension (previously called Language Learning with Netflix, but now it works with YouTube as well!).

03Sep21: I did Pimsleur Lesson 15. This time I felt pretty confident about my pronunciation of the palatal fricative and the velar fricative! However I had trouble pronouncing the phrase “für mich”.

05Sep21: I did more Mango Languages lessons. I'm halfway done with Chapter 2 now.

My original plan was to study Spanish and German from September 6 to September 19. However, I've decided to impose a new rule for those two weeks: the only Spanish studying I can do is speaking practice or writing practice. This is because I want to focus on German and a non-language-related project of mine.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Sat Sep 11, 2021 6:20 pm

Spanish
08Sep21: I practiced writing for 30 minutes. As with French, I'm going to keep a list of topics that I cover to ensure that I don't repeat them too often. This day's topic was my first day of grad school. (I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it here, but I decided to do a master's instead of a PhD. I'm really happy with my decision!)

11Sep21: I practiced speaking for 10 minutes. Instead of discussing a particular topic, I ended up just rambling about my Spanish studies. Oops. I also scheduled an iTalki lesson for next weekend! I haven't had an iTalki lesson in Spanish since late 2019, so I'm a little bit nervous, but the teacher seems very nice.

German
07Sep21: I finished Chapter 2 of Mango Languages on my way home from work. I'm still really enjoying Mango Languages, but the lessons are very repetitive so doing too many at once is boring.

08Sep21: I did Pimsleur Lesson 16. This lesson taught the numbers 20-49, and the end of the lesson included a bunch of algebra questions in German. It was fun. :) Next, I watched the first episode of the show Biohackers. I also wrote a few sentences in German about my day and posted them on iTalki.

09Sep21: I did some more lessons from Mango Languages.

10Sep21: I watched the second episode of Biohackers, using the Language Reactor extension so I could read both the English and the German subtitles. It's fun to watch a show about gene therapy, which is what I do for work. And the show is making me more excited to learn German and visit Germany! I read that part of the show was filmed in Munich, and now I'd like to go there in addition to Berlin.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Mon Sep 13, 2021 4:30 pm

Spanish
12Sep21: I wrote in my journal for 30 minutes. I had to look up a lot of words that I used to know, even basic words like "casi" and "conseguir". However, overall I felt like my writing had improved compared to a couple of weeks ago.

German
12Sep21: I did Pimsleur Lesson 17 and a finished Chapter 3 of Mango Languages. Even though I borrowed a couple of grammar exercise books from the library, I don't think I'll actually need them! I'm really pleased with how well I've picked up German conjugations and declensions from Mango. Now my biggest problem is a lack of vocabulary. I really need to learn more words!
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Thu Sep 16, 2021 11:59 am

Well, the first course for my master’s degree has turned out to be a lot of work, so I haven’t done anything language-related this week. The exception is that I’ve been doing Clozemaster for German during my commute. I’m almost done with the 100 most common words and next I’ll move on to the 500 most common.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Sat Sep 18, 2021 3:33 pm

Considering how busy I've been with this semester's master's course, I've decided to change my language routine. Instead of alternating between Spanish and French, I'm going to let myself study whichever language I'm in the mood for. And I've rescheduled my Spanish iTalki lesson for next weekend, because today I need to work on my first problem set for class.
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Re: Amanda's 2021 Log: Spanish, French, German, and a little Ancient Greek

Postby philomath » Wed Sep 22, 2021 12:03 pm

Spanish
19Sep21: I wrote in my journal for 30 minutes. To my horror, I realized I had been writing "decidí a _" for "I decided to _", even though Spanish doesn't use "a" there. I was convinced that "decidí a" was correct until I checked DeepL and multiple online dictionaries. I've forgotten so much Spanish. :(

20Sep21: Instead of continuing Cien años de soledad, I began reading En los zapatos de Valeria by Elísabet Benavent, which is the book that inspired the Netflix show Valeria. It's definitely not great literature (and in fact is rather, uh, explicit), but it's written in first-person point-of-view, which I think is helpful for language-learning, and it's entertaining. I haven't given up on Cien años de soledad though!

21Sep21: I listened to an episode of Niñas Bien and read more of En los zapatos de Valeria. Later, I watched a couple of videos from a YouTube channel I just discovered, called Raquel Bookish.

That night I had a dream in Spanish. In the dream I was explaining some kind of mathematical equation to my boyfriend in Spanish, even though he doesn't speak Spanish. The only sentence I remember from it is "Hay que multiplicar esto por esto, ¿verás?" I have no idea where the dream came from. :lol:

French
20Sep21: I listened to another episode of Transfert and watched a video from the YouTube channel I like, Christelle Lebailly Auteur. I also tried watching one of her recent Twitch streams, but it wasn't very interesting.

German
21Sep21: I started learning the 500 most common words on Clozemaster. I should start doing Pimsleur lessons again... but every day when I get home from work I feel too tired.
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