dEhiN's Language Log

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dEhiN
Yellow Belt
Posts: 95
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:44 am
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N); French (B2); Spanish / Brazilian Portuguese (A1-A2); Tamil (A1); Albanian / Tagalog / Maori (A0 - some words)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21&t=17669
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dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » Sat Jan 08, 2022 8:07 am

I'm starting a language log to keep track of my 365 Challenge study progress. I might not post every single day, but I'll aim to post at least once a week. I started the challenge on Jan. 7 and I'm doing the generic option with French, Tamil and Spanish.

French
At this point, I estimate my French to be around the B1/B2 range. Generally, my writing and reading skills have been better than speaking and listening, though that's slowly changing. I want to focus initially (and perhaps for the whole year) on improving my speaking and listening skills. For this, I'm going to rely on 3 main sources - work, girlfriend and TV.

Work - I work in IT Help Desk for a company that provides IT services for other companies. Because I live in Canada, some of our clients have employees (aka, users) who live in the province of Quebec. I almost exclusively write any email replies to them in French, but because most of them are decently bilingual, I tend to speak with them in mostly English with some French thrown in. However, there was one user I interacted with several times recently whose English is probably on par with my French. As a result, I intentionally spoke to him in French and he was kind enough to be patient and respond to me in slowed down French!

Girlfriend - My partner isn't bilingual but she went to a French immersion primary school. She also did her Bachelors in French Studies. As a result, she remembers quite a lot of French and has a greater sense than me of what is correct French or not. (I say she remembers quite a lot because it has been quite some time since she was in uni.) This is why she is a resource for me to practice my speaking and listening.

TV - In this case, I specifically mean any Canadian French content. For example, where I live, even though it's in English Canada, our TV provider package comes with at least one French channel. When I first started this job early last year, and found I had the opportunity to interact with French employees, I started watching this French channel. At the time, almost everything was too fast for me. More recently, I find that, depending on the type of show and who's speaking, I can pick up roughly about 10% of what's being said.

Tamil
Tamil is my heritage language, but I grew up in Canada from a young age. Additionally, while growing up, my parents (who are both fluent in Tamil) spoke English to my siblings and me. This is in part because my family on both sides are quite anglicized, such that my parents also spoke English at home growing up despite living in Sri Lanka and schooling in Tamil. Both of these things combined to make me basically monolingual. (I did go to a Montessori in Sri Lanka, but I don't know how much of the Tamil language I would have been exposed to). My journey with Tamil has been long and slow-going. I estimate my Tamil to be around A1, even after technically starting this journey to learn my heritage language around 23 years ago. Initially, a lot of it was lack of resources - I could utilize my parents but they couldn't really teach me Tamil, particularly the grammar which is agglutinative. The resources that were mostly online at the time were Indian Tamil based, and I really wanted to learn Sri Lankan Tamil. Over time, I gave up on holding to this distinction and just started using whatever resources I could find. I also had taught myself the script 23 years ago, so throughout this journey, that has been one boon for me. I've had a lot of starts and stops in regard to pushing myself, to finding places and people to practice or learn with, and to finding and using online or offline resources that taught the grammar. However, a lot of the grammatical structures I've learned over the years have still stuck with me, such that I can parse simple sentences.

Spanish
In 2011 is basically when I started really pursuing my language interests. Prior to that, I had only done French in public and high school as well as a little self-study in Tamil starting in grade 10. However, in 2011, I got into online language exchanges and primarily started with French to relearn it. I also tried my hand at learning some Spanish. Over the past 10 years, I've made a decent on-and-off go at Spanish. I've focused mostly on Latin American Spanish, though I haven't really picked a specific variety of LAS. I estimate my level to be about A2. I think in order to take it to B1, apart from continuing to utilize it in all 4 areas of learning as well as building up my vocabulary, I need to just bite the bullet and continue my learning of Spanish verb conjugations. In truth, I only know present tense for sure; I have started to become familiar with some preterite patterns, but not much and definitely not through an intentional study of the preterite conjugations. However, one thing I have going for me is that my work has one client from Mexico City, and while the users there speak some English, I again use the opportunity to write in Spanish. In spoken interactions, though, I've defaulted to English because I'm much less confident in my speaking abilities.
8 x

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dEhiN
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Posts: 95
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:44 am
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N); French (B2); Spanish / Brazilian Portuguese (A1-A2); Tamil (A1); Albanian / Tagalog / Maori (A0 - some words)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21&t=17669
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » Sat Jan 08, 2022 6:52 pm

Small correction to the above - my Spanish is more likely A1/A2.

These are my goals for my 3 languages. As you may have noticed from my first post, I tend to write "walls of text". This post became no different, so I'm breaking it up into 3 posts, one for each language.

French
I want to become a solid B2 in all 4 areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening. As I mentioned above, I have the opportunity at work to write in French to French users when they submit a help desk ticket. When I first started doing this, I found myself using WordReference a lot to look up things - mostly to confirm grammar and spelling things. Over the past several months, I've looked up things less, but I still feel a need to do it every so often. I'd like to build my confidence in my current abilities to express myself, both in writing and speaking. Additionally, when I started my French journey, I focused more on Parisian French. More recently, particularly in thanks to my girlfriend, I've been trying to listen more to Quebecois French. I think in terms of my goal of becoming B2-level in listening, I'm not going to limit myself to particular dialects and accents, though out of necessity I will probably utilise more Quebecois French materials.

Here's my short-term breakdown of what I'll do:
  1. Writing
    • Continue to write in French whenever I can for work
  2. Speaking
    • Continue to speak with my girlfriend and try to get in the habit of defaulting to French in our interactions over English
    • Build up the confidence to speak more French with French users at work on remote calls
    • Try not to immediately jump back to English on aforementioned calls whenever I don't quite remember how to say something out of fear that the short pause while I gather my thoughts will irritate the user
  3. Reading
    • Use the opportunity living in Canada affords me and try to read the French side of product labels, mostly for vocab building
  4. Listening
    • Listen to as much French TV as I can, even if I want to relax with some TV and switching to the French channel means I won't grasp most of what's happening*
    • Re-watch episodes of Disney+ or Amazon Prime shows that I've watched in English, but with French audio
    • Possibly look at connecting with a Quebec French tandem language exchange partner for once a week video calls
*I'll do this within reason since sometimes the need to relax or destress by watching something I can understand might outweigh the desire to practice my French
5 x
Anki
fr : 658 / 1473
es : 199 / 799
ta : 59 / 649
pt : 118 / 556
mi : 10 / 22
tl : 5 / 37
sq : 12 / 73

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dEhiN
Yellow Belt
Posts: 95
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:44 am
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N); French (B2); Spanish / Brazilian Portuguese (A1-A2); Tamil (A1); Albanian / Tagalog / Maori (A0 - some words)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21&t=17669
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » Sat Jan 08, 2022 6:58 pm

The second of my language goal posts.

Spanish
My goal is to become a solid A2 in all 4 areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening. One thing I definitely need to do is build up some of my basic grammar knowledge, particularly as I said in my first post, my verb conjugation endings.

Here's my short-term breakdown of what I'll do:
  1. General Grammar
    • Find one or more resources to go through and learn the tense endings of preterite, imperfect and future along with the imperative mood
    • Boost my vocab and understanding of commonly used prepositional linking words
  2. Writing
    • Continue writing in Spanish whenever I can for work
  3. Reading / Speaking / Listening
    • Nothing specifically, except just whatever opportunities may arise at work
3 x
Anki
fr : 658 / 1473
es : 199 / 799
ta : 59 / 649
pt : 118 / 556
mi : 10 / 22
tl : 5 / 37
sq : 12 / 73

Study resources
¡Adelante! Uno : 11 / 218

ISO 639-1 Language Codes

User avatar
dEhiN
Yellow Belt
Posts: 95
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:44 am
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N); French (B2); Spanish / Brazilian Portuguese (A1-A2); Tamil (A1); Albanian / Tagalog / Maori (A0 - some words)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21&t=17669
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Contact:

Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » Sat Jan 08, 2022 7:00 pm

The third and last of my language goal posts.

Tamil
My goal is to become a solid A1 in all 4 areas of reading, writing, speaking and listening. By this, I mean that currently, while I can read the Tamil script, I'm still a little slow at it from the on-and-off learning. For writing, I've really only recently started writing some small things in Tamil with my parents, but it's more when I have a specific question. For speaking, I still only know or can express a smattering of words and short phrases that my family used when I was growing up. Lastly, for listening, I can really only understand when my parents speak to me in Tamil, but even then, it has to be slow enough and using the vocab I already know. Thus, I consider myself A1 based out of the sheer amount of time I've been learning Tamil (and I'm only counting the on part of the on-and-off learning), but I'm more like in between A0 and A1. The good news is that from some of the on times of learning, I've picked up a decent amount of foundational vocab and grammar to possibly consider myself about 25% into A1 but I need to coalesce this knowledge and utilize it to build up my 4 skills until I'm comfortable.

Here's my short-term breakdown of what I'll do:
  1. General Grammar
    • Refresh and review the various amount of grammar I have learned over the years, bringing it back from a passive knowledge to active
    • Work on becoming comfortable in both actively producing and utilising said grammar structures as well as recognizing the use of them with any input I consume
  2. Reading
    • Become more comfortable reading Tamil script as well as faster at it
  3. Writing
    • Find or create opportunities to write in Tamil which will allow me to more actively use whatever vocab and grammar I know, as well as look up more vocab
  4. Speaking / Listening
    • Nothing specifically, particularly because I first become comfortable in a language through the written word (even though I know that speech came before writing and we naturally learn to speak but are taught to write); once I feel that the coalescing I spoke of has happened with reading and writing, I'll turn my attention to speaking and listening
4 x
Anki
fr : 658 / 1473
es : 199 / 799
ta : 59 / 649
pt : 118 / 556
mi : 10 / 22
tl : 5 / 37
sq : 12 / 73

Study resources
¡Adelante! Uno : 11 / 218

ISO 639-1 Language Codes

User avatar
dEhiN
Yellow Belt
Posts: 95
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:44 am
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N); French (B2); Spanish / Brazilian Portuguese (A1-A2); Tamil (A1); Albanian / Tagalog / Maori (A0 - some words)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21&t=17669
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » Sat Jan 08, 2022 7:05 pm

Finally, a word about my reference above to my "wall of text" posts. Another user on here, whom I know from another language forum, has described my language log type of posts as such. It bothers me I guess to think that someone sees my personal thoughts that way. The main reason I write a lot, even when I start out intending not to, is because writing (or talking depending on the situation) is one of my main ways to self-reflect, process, analyze, and make decisions and goals about whatever is on my mind or that I'm dealing with. However, for the sake of brevity and anyone who is interested in this log, I will do my best to keep things short, or at least break up longer posts into 2 or 3 smaller ones. At least that way, it's easier to read a post or two and then come back later if you're so inclined.
5 x
Anki
fr : 658 / 1473
es : 199 / 799
ta : 59 / 649
pt : 118 / 556
mi : 10 / 22
tl : 5 / 37
sq : 12 / 73

Study resources
¡Adelante! Uno : 11 / 218

ISO 639-1 Language Codes

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luke
Brown Belt
Posts: 1243
Joined: Fri Aug 07, 2015 9:09 pm
Languages: English (N). Spanish (intermediate), Esperanto (B1), French (intermediate but rusting)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 15&t=16948
x 3631

Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby luke » Sat Jan 08, 2022 7:13 pm

dEhiN wrote:Finally, a word about my reference above to my "wall of text" posts.

Your is your log and meandering thoughts may be be what just what the doctor ordered.

I often edit my posts before the final initial post to tighten them up a bit. Some of my thoughts don't make my exposition any clearer, so I remove those clauses for the sake of readers and clarity. That may sound like news to anyone reading this, as they might think, "your default is to ramble even more than you do"?

I have not detected that you have that issue. Your posts seem well organized and sometimes details are the most important part of a post.
4 x
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dEhiN
Yellow Belt
Posts: 95
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:44 am
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N); French (B2); Spanish / Brazilian Portuguese (A1-A2); Tamil (A1); Albanian / Tagalog / Maori (A0 - some words)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21&t=17669
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Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » Sat Jan 08, 2022 10:20 pm

luke wrote:Your is your log and meandering thoughts may be be what just what the doctor ordered.

I often edit my posts before the final initial post to tighten them up a bit. Some of my thoughts don't make my exposition any clearer, so I remove those clauses for the sake of readers and clarity. That may sound like news to anyone reading this, as they might think, "your default is to ramble even more than you do"?

I have not detected that you have that issue. Your posts seem well organized and sometimes details are the most important part of a post.

¡Muchas gracias por tu apoyo! Tu manera me gusta y pienso que voy a la utilizar.
1 x
Anki
fr : 658 / 1473
es : 199 / 799
ta : 59 / 649
pt : 118 / 556
mi : 10 / 22
tl : 5 / 37
sq : 12 / 73

Study resources
¡Adelante! Uno : 11 / 218

ISO 639-1 Language Codes

User avatar
dEhiN
Yellow Belt
Posts: 95
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:44 am
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N); French (B2); Spanish / Brazilian Portuguese (A1-A2); Tamil (A1); Albanian / Tagalog / Maori (A0 - some words)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21&t=17669
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Contact:

Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » Sun Jan 09, 2022 12:42 am

Challenge update time.

This is what I did yesterday:
01.07.22.png


French
I'm not going to count my inner dialogue going forward. I did so yesterday only because of the spontaneity of it, and that that indicated a turning point in my comfort level in expressing myself in French. I will continue to count significant attempts and portions of time spent conversing with my girlfriend in French, at least for now. If things get to the point where it's no longer an effort or stretch to interact with her in French, then I'll stop counting that time.

Tamil
I'm really, really proud of myself for the Tamil reading and analyzing. As I wrote in my tracking spreadsheet, I initially tried to watch the first episode with both the audio and subtitles in Tamil. I quickly found it too much, in part because the pronunciation was that of Indian Tamil and it was causing me to miss words that I know. (For those who don't know, Tamil is a diglossic language. The differences between Spoken and Literary Tamil aren't as great as with Arabic, but they are significant enough. Additionally, while both Sri Lankan and Indian Tamil has its own subset of dialects, there are also significant enough differences to make Spoken Sri Lankan Tamil and Spoken Indian Tamil separate branches on the Spoken Tamil tree.) I also only considered the reading and analyzing to be about 15 minutes, even though an episode is 1 hour, because most of the time I was focused on the storyline. In fact, in order to get my reading practice in, I had to actually pause the video and go back sometimes several times. This got to be a little tedious for every single sentence, so I only did it a few times. However, I was able to not just recognize content words I know but also grammatical structures and rules I've learned in the past. Tamil, like Finnish and Turkish, is an agglutinative language. It's because of this that I had so much trouble as a teenager trying to learn Tamil from my parents. As native speakers, they couldn't break down the suffixes being added, nor the rules for suffix addition. Therefore, I'm glad that I was able to take some sentences from the subtitles and match up the sentence structure in Tamil with the structure of the equivalent English dialogue.
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Last edited by dEhiN on Sun Jan 09, 2022 5:28 am, edited 1 time in total.
4 x
Anki
fr : 658 / 1473
es : 199 / 799
ta : 59 / 649
pt : 118 / 556
mi : 10 / 22
tl : 5 / 37
sq : 12 / 73

Study resources
¡Adelante! Uno : 11 / 218

ISO 639-1 Language Codes

User avatar
dEhiN
Yellow Belt
Posts: 95
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:44 am
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N); French (B2); Spanish / Brazilian Portuguese (A1-A2); Tamil (A1); Albanian / Tagalog / Maori (A0 - some words)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21&t=17669
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Contact:

Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » Sun Jan 09, 2022 5:27 am

Challenge update time.

This is what I did on Jan. 8:
01.08.22.png


French
I had a difficult time doing the 30 minutes today (ok, technically, yesterday for me since it's past midnight, but for the challenge purposes, I'm still awake). Changing the GPS to French and reading the weather announcement in French were spontaneous acts on my part - I didn't force myself to do them in order to meet the 30 minutes. However, as you can see, those two alone or even the first 3 activities only took about 20 minutes. Counting the translation into English felt a little like a copout for me, but it is French practice for sure, particularly because I tried as much as possible to force myself to translate whole clauses or sentences at a time.
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3 x
Anki
fr : 658 / 1473
es : 199 / 799
ta : 59 / 649
pt : 118 / 556
mi : 10 / 22
tl : 5 / 37
sq : 12 / 73

Study resources
¡Adelante! Uno : 11 / 218

ISO 639-1 Language Codes

User avatar
dEhiN
Yellow Belt
Posts: 95
Joined: Sat Mar 12, 2016 1:44 am
Location: Toronto
Languages: English (N); French (B2); Spanish / Brazilian Portuguese (A1-A2); Tamil (A1); Albanian / Tagalog / Maori (A0 - some words)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 21&t=17669
x 253
Contact:

Re: dEhiN's Language Log

Postby dEhiN » Sun Jan 09, 2022 5:45 am

I've written a lot of posts in the past 24 hours just on this log alone! This will probably slow down, and I might start posting my challenge study activities for a few days in a row. However, before I stop for today, I wanted to share both the Tamil parsing and French-to-English translation that I did.

French
Here's the original weather announcement that I viewed.
01.08.22-a.jpg
01.08.22-b.jpg

Here's my attempt at translating it into English after looking up the vocab I didn't know. Please feel free to comment/correct.
Description
Snow squalls shall form Sunday evening.

Dangers:
Snow caused by the lake effect from Lake Huron and Georgian Bay et accumulations of 10 cm of snow over a 12-hour period.
Reduced visibility due to falling snow.*
Routes covered in snow and ice.

When:
From Sunday evening until Monday.

Description:
A strong cold front will traverse the region Sunday morning and will bring very cold Arctic air. Snow squalls will form on Lake Huron and Georgian Bay Sunday evening and finally gradually stop Monday.
###
Trips might be dangerous due to sudden changing weather conditions. Visibility may be suddenly reduced from blowing snow.
A snow squall watched is issued when conditions are favourable for the formation of snow bands which may produce a very big accumulation of snow and zero visibility.
Please continue to track the alerts and issued warnings from Environment Canada. To let us know about inclement weather, email us at meteoON@ec.gc.ca or tweet using the hashtag #ONMeteo.

*I wasn't sure how to translate Visibilité réduite sous la neige forte et dans la poudrerie. That is, I understand all those words and a word-for-word literal translation would be "Reduced visibility under the strong snow and in the powder", where "powder" refers to the powdery-like snow that blows easily with the wind. But, I felt that in English, it would be more natural to say "falling snow" or "blowing snow" and not feel a need to specify "strong snow and powdery snow". What do you think?
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3 x
Anki
fr : 658 / 1473
es : 199 / 799
ta : 59 / 649
pt : 118 / 556
mi : 10 / 22
tl : 5 / 37
sq : 12 / 73

Study resources
¡Adelante! Uno : 11 / 218

ISO 639-1 Language Codes


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