Rdearman 2016/17/18/19/20/21 [One good deed is better than a thousand good intentions]

[rdearman]

Since when you started to look Russian?

[javier_getafe]

They posted my talk.

Eyyy, I'm so pleased to know you after all this pods time

Good video!! congratulations!

[wornoutsneakers]

To that end I've printed an article from one of the newspapers, and I'm slowly and labouredly working my way through it with the help of Google Translate.

Hello! I wanted to offer a suggestion for your reading and translation practice. Try Naver's Korean-English dictionary for a while. (Naver is basically Korea's Google.) When you search for a word in Naver, you will get more complete definitions than Google provides, and you will be able to see the Korean word in its root form rather than its conjugated form. Perhaps more importantly (since you are studying Chinese as well), you will be able to see the Chinese characters that form the basis of the Korean word. I believe more than half of Korean words are actually Sino-Korean, so once you are able to make the connection between the Hanja character and the Korean letter, your rate of vocabulary acquisition will soar.

To access the Naver dictionary from a browser, go to https://papago.naver.com/. There is also a Chrome extension called Naver Korean/English Dictionary Lookup. If you prefer a mobile app, search for NAVER Korean Dictionary in the app store.

I hope this is helpful.

[rdearman]

I was interviewed by Kris Broholm from the Actual Fluency Podcast last night. Don't know when it will be released. But it was cool.

[rdearman]

I did two dialang tests one for French and one for Italian. The result was that I don't know squat and my level is not even A1.

Therefore, I've decided to cancel my 4 scheduled hour long conversations in French and Italian that I do each week, and stop reading the sci-fi book in French and the 800-page epic historical fiction in Italian. But first I'm going to really go off on these people I've been speaking too! How dare they have conversations with me in languages I don't know! In some cases for 4 years running! The worse offender is this French woman, who I thought was my friend, and has been talking to me each week for 4 years. You would have thought that in over 200 conversations about 100 hours of which were in French she would have brought up the fact I can't speak French.

The cheek of it! Having conversations in French about Brexit, flying aeroplanes, making cakes, films, writing books, children's psychology and her work as a speech therapist, and she failed to mention that I can't speak French? Je suis tellement en colère contre elle !

And don't get me started on that horrible Italian bloke who makes me do almost the entire language exchange in Italian because he says my Italian is better than his English ! Liar! Dialang says I don't know Italian, so how DARE this bloody Italian guy say things like that?

I mean I have done well over a thousand language exchanges in the last 5 years in French and Italian and none of these people could be bothered to tell me I'm not able to function in these languages? I'm less than A1 apparently, which means "Can understand and use very basic expressions to satisfy concrete needs. Can interact simply as long as the other person speaks slowly and clearly."

Yet these horrible people talk to me at normal speed about crazy stuff like how an aeroplane works in French, or how to generate a secure certificate, or how to bind a book in Italian. And then there is the sick b^$"£rd who wanted me to write on his Italian travel blog about tourist sites in the UK. He was really having a laugh. Good thing I was too busy studying Chinese to humiliate myself with that.

Thank goodness I now have a computer tell me I can't speak or interact with people. Because five years of speaking and interacting to people certainly hasn't. I must have looked a right fool talking to that guy from Cameroon in French for a couple of hours. Imagine how I must have looked speaking (at least I thought I was speaking) to an Italian guy in Rome for 2 or three hours, going to a family dinner and translating for my daughter while 4-5 people were speaking at once. I'm beginning to think most of the native speakers in Rome haven't taken a test yet, and they probably don't know that they can't speak Italian either.

Maybe I should take the English test too? Horrible thought, maybe I don't know English either !!!

[rdearman]

The French lady who refused to tell me I can't speak French? Well she went off and did the dialang test in French. She scored C1. So if a University educated speech therapist can't ace the test, what hope have I got?

[smallwhite]

The English test.

[rdearman]

The English test.

I should try that, since she got C1 on that also!

[rdearman]

I seem to be on a theme about test taking. YT recommended a video with a Chinese Native who teaches Mandarin and took an HSK test.


HSK 6 level pass requires 2660+ characters, but how many do university educated Chinese students know?? You might be surprised.

[garyb]

I've come to believe that the two absolute worst ways of gauging your level in a language are taking an online level test and asking a native speaker.