Expug's TAC 2016 - Writing the lines of fluency

[Expugnator]

All's well so fine with my grammar studies in the morning, Estonian (reviewing Tuldava), Russian (Intermediate Russian by Routledge) and Georgian (reviewing Hewitt's A Learner's Grammar). It is just that grammar is usually tiresome, even with it's mostly reviewing and trying to fine-tune some nuances that are mostly left unnoticed when there is too much info at a time (which usually is the case). After 3 grammar books in a row I will probably go for some intensive reading. I (re)learned to say "twins" in Georgian: ტყუპი დები is twin sisters =D

Today there is less activity on Hello Talk. I'm starting to become comfortable with some islands, like how long I've been studying Chinese or whether I have a Chinese name =D

I meet mostly Russians on Speaky, and it is time I speak more Russian. These days I've been speaking only English with them. There was also Georgian at the Whatsapp group. The Georgian girl started sharing some songs and I could understood most of what was being sung.

I also learned that 'glass' in Georgian is შუშა (pronounced Xuxa, the name of a(n) (in)famous Brazilian TV host).

FInally found time for watching dubbed films in Georgian. I picked Ant-Man. Being a recent film, the dubbing is also better, not entirely consisting of a single voice-over. The dubbing is pretty clear and the language starts to become transparent. English subtitles also match, which makes my job even easier.

So, today I finished tasks a little earlier, thanks to a headstart in the morning, and now there's no excuse for not doing output. Here we go:

Norwegian.Jeg tar del i en Whatsappgruppe for folk som lærer norsk, men nesten alle er nybegynnere og deretter finnes det ikke mange interessante samtaler. Hvis du vet om andre grupper vær så god å fortell meg. Jeg gleder meg til å kunne snakke norsk oftere men jeg finner ikke mange anledninger for å gjøre det.
Det har regnet hele dagen i dag. Ingen problem. Det har regnet ikke for sterk for å gå på gate, og det var for varmt i går. Jeg fikk nesten ikke sove. Jeg måtte våkne opp veldig tidlig for å gå på helsestudioet fordi jeg skulle ha en avtale klokka åtte. Så sto jeg opp halv seks. Alt gikk bra og jeg fikk til og med ekstra tid for å lære språk mens jeg ventet på tide å dra til jobb. Deretter har jeg også tid nok for å skrive noe ord i norsk i dag. =D

Russian. я думал, что сегодня будет бы хорошо для разговоров на русском языке, но это было совсем не так. только один человек говорил ко мне в Speaky, и расговор было совсем короткий. Мне гораздо более повезло с китайском, на которой я на цели день говорю в приложенье Hello Talk.
я чуть не забыл: мне в Italki в профиле русского языка нет. Поэтому, я хотел бы, чтобы мой друзей на этом форуме исправили мои ошибки. Спасибо!

Estonian. Mul on veel natuke aega, et kirjutan eesti keelt. Täna olen ühe lehe lugenud romaanist. See on vene roomani, aga mul on eesti- ja hispaania tõlked. Sellepärast otsustasin, et loeksid seda romani eesti- ja hispaania keeles. Hispaania ja Portugali keeled on väga sarnased keeled. Iga kord, kui ma loen hispaania keeles, ma kõik saan aru. Nii ma esiteks loen raamatut eesti keeles, ning kui ma ühe sõna ei saa aru, ma loen sama sõna hispaania keeles.

That's all folks, see you guys tomorrow!

[Arnaud]

deleted

[Josquin]

Russian. Я думал, что сегодня было бы хорошо для разговоров на русском языке, но это было совсем не так. Только один человек говорил со мной в (на?) Speaky, и расговор был совсем короткий. Мне гораздо более повезло с китайском, на котором я говорил целый день в (на?) приложении Hello Talk.
Я чуть не забыл: у меня в (на?) Italki в профиле русского языка нет. Поэтому, я хотел бы, чтобы мои друзья на этом форуме исправили мои ошибки. Спасибо!

I'm not Russian either, but I think I caught the most obvious grammatical errors. There are still some things which don't sound entirely idiomatic to me, but I'll leave it to a native speaker to provide corrections for those.

[Expugnator]

@Thank you guys, it helped a lot. I'm still making mistakes that now, the day after, indeed look obviously wrong even at my level (call it a linguistic hangover? ). That means I need to keep practicing.

I changed my profile to learning RUssian instead of Chinese on Hello Talk yesterday and today I was contacted by a Russian. It's practical to chat on the phone, as at the desktop (where I use Speaky) there are always many tabs open .Btw, sounds like I have a definitive Chinese name, which sounds quite like my real name. 我中国的名字又好看，有好听!

After a long chat session I went for Chinese reading, was a bit tired of characters already. First page was a bit slow but then I resumed my usual rhythm. Then I started exchanging voice messages in Russian, but it's too slow and I make terrible mistakes. Pronunciation itself is tongue-twisting, even though in theory I know how to pronounce the words.

Finished "Secrets of a Computer Company", from the Chinese Breeze series. This one is level 2 (500 words) and is pretty easy. Now i'm going for a level 3 one and I hope I can still have fun while becoming familiar with the language. Having comprehensible input from this reader really helped improve my output skills.

More good news: I managed to get the first season of the series I want to watch dubbed in German and now the 2nd one is on its way!

The film Ant-Man sounds interesting so far. Even better, I'm watching a film i'd like to, I'm doing it in Georgian finally with good dubbing and I already notice my listening get better.

French. Mon jour d'études est terminé comme il me plait : avec la lecture du livre d'estonien et sa traduction en espagnol (je ne comprends pas suffisamment l'estonien, c'est bien sûr). Aujourd'hui j'ai commencé à comprendre des phrases plus longues. Je n'ai pas eu beaucoup de mal à associer le texte estonien et celui espagnol, ce qui était troublant lorsque j'ai commencé la lecture de ce livre. Même si je ne lis qu'une page par jour, je crois que je fais de vrais progrès en lisant un peu plus lentement, plutôt 'intensivement', même si ce n'est pas exactement le cas. Lorsque j'ai commencé à étudier l'estonien j'ai été bien résolu à ne pas répéter avec l'estonien les mêmes erreurs que j'ai commis avec le géorgien, le russe et l'allemand. Je ne vais pas lire ce livre seulement pour le finir le plus vite possible, comme si je n'étais pas en train d'étudier une langue à travers cet exercice. Même si l'histoire me semble très intéressante, je vais patienter et suivre le rytme necessaire à le bon apprentissage de la langue.

(Pour les francopohones: y-a-til une alternative pour éviter de répéter 'même si' mille fois comme j'ai fait ci-dessus ? À propos, corrigez, s'il vous plait !)

[Arnaud]

deleted

[Elenia]

(Pour les francopohones: y-a-til une alternative pour éviter de répéter 'même si' mille fois comme j'ai fait ci-dessus ? À propos, corrigez, s'il vous plait !)

Not native, but 'bien que' springs to mind. I don't know if it will fit everywhere, but 'bien que je ne lise qu'une page par jour' seems okay to my non-native eyes.

Note:Arnaud got there before I did!

[Serpent]

Mais correções (usei a versão de Josquin )

Я думал, что сегодня было бы хорошо для разговоров на русском языке, но это было совсем не так.
This sounds good but clearly non-native. We don't really use сегодня (or вчера, завтра...) as nouns. We also don't have a future-in-the-past. совсем не так sounds dramatic, especially given that you did have one conversation.
Я думал, что смогу сегодня [как следует] попрактиковать мой русский, но не сложилось/не получилось/не повезло.
Fun note: we also generally lack expressions like "have a nice day", "bad hair day" etc. The way you attempted to word it would've been almost fine if you had been hoping for nice weather, like Я надеялся, что сегодня будет подходящий день для поездки за город/для того, чтобы устроить пикник. or что сегодняшний день будет удачным для рыбалки. If it's more than just wishful thinking, you can also use рассчитывал. Both verbs I used also work well for your sentence - I guess that's our compensation for not using words like "I guess" or "I believe" instead of "think"
Только один человек поговорил со мной в (на?) Speaky, и разговор был совсем короткий.
fine but kinda formal (although if you retain the formality level, you should use коротким - or недолгим). I'd say На Speaky удалось/получилось поговорить только с одним человеком, и совсем недолго/немного. OR На Speaky мне ответил/написал только один человек, и мы поговорили совсем недолго/немного. Maybe I'm reading too much into it but I associate your wording with разговор здесь короткий, which would imply threats, blackmailing, this sort of thing from movies
Мне гораздо больше повезло с китайском, на котором я говорил целый день в (на?) приложении Hello Talk.
Я чуть не забыл: у меня в (на?) Italki в профиле русского языка нет. Поэтому, я хотел бы, чтобы мои друзья на этом форуме исправили мои ошибки. Спасибо!
this is fine and quite native-like, but I'd say both страница and cringeworthy профайл are more common than профиль in this meaning (though you'll certainly see it in many badly translated interfaces). for the sake of clarity I'd say у меня на странице в italki русский язык не указан, and maybe explain further if you can only list a certain number of languages etc. Also I *think* we generally ask more explicitly, like Поэтому я очень прошу моих/своих друзей на форуме исправлять (from now on) or исправить (today) мои ошибки/ошибки в моих постах OR сообщениях на русском.
the comma after поэтому is definitely unnecessary, I'd even say it's likely a mistake.

About в/на:
the set forms are в Интернете, в сети (including social and local networks too, and the web in general), в программе, в приложении, в браузере, на сайте. with specific names на is more common. however, with the italki sentence I'd use either в профайле на italki or на странице в italki. I think it can be phonetics/prosody, since it sounds clumsy to repeat the same preposition, and in isolation I thiiiink в italki sounds better because it begins with a vowel. but basically these are generally fine either way, at least to me.
in some cases you may need по, like по имейлу (электронной почте), по аське (icq), по скайпу, по whatsapp. через often sounds american but I'd use it for example with telegram, since otherwise it feels too similar to the word телеграмма and any inflected forms just feel weird. of course this may change if people start using the actual word again, maybe after telegraph becomes a thing of the past completely.

[smallwhite]

我中国的名字又好看，有好听!

Corrections, your words red, my words blue:
我的中国中文的名字又好看，有又好听!

Corrected into:
我的中文名字又好看，又好听!

I believe you meant "My Chinese name is both good-looking and good-sounding!"
What you wrote meant "My China's name is both good-looking, has good-sounding!"
For example, "my father's name" would be "我爸爸的名字".
Feel free to ask if you want anything else explained.

[Expugnator]

Thank you all for the corrections! I still don't feel comfortable about writing in Russian any further, I need to chat regularly the way I'm already doing with Chinese.

我中国的名字又好看，有好听!

Corrections, your words red, my words blue:
我的中国中文的名字又好看，有又好听!

Corrected into:
我的中文名字又好看，又好听!

I believe you meant "My Chinese name is both good-looking and good-sounding!"
What you wrote meant "My China's name is both good-looking, has good-sounding!"
For example, "my father's name" would be "我爸爸的名字".
Feel free to ask if you want anything else explained.

It's ok. Thanks for the help, it's time I write long paragraphs for more practice. 有好听 was a typo, I am getting used to input at Android and when I used Desktop with Google Translate it didn't turn out that smart in predicting and the second you just used the most common character overall instead of predicting the syntax feature I was going to use.

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It seems to me that Russian is a 'narrow-context' language, like Mandarin, but not so much. What does it mean? In casual conversation there's no much room for awkwardness or unusual grammar/vocabulary relationship. If you don't say a sentence the way it easily is said by natives in that context, the chance of misunderstanding or at least awkward looks after a strong effort from the native speaker to understand are pretty high. So if I write something like "I found it difficult to finish the exercise" instead of "It was difficult for me to finish the exercise" it's almost like I'm writing a foreign language. Another difficult of Russian, which I have to start working on now.

I've finished reading the great "Discours sur l'origine de l'univers" (thanks Ogrim) by Étienne Klein. Now I'm going to stay on non-fiction for a while and then take a contemporary novel again to build up my vocabulary.

Started reading my first level 3 Chinese Breeze book. No big deal really. I had to look up two words with my smartphone's camera but that was that for the first three pages.

Reading Georgian feels almost 'easy' and I'm glad I chose a trilogy with lots of dialogues. I'm reading at least halves of paragraphs without checking the translation. What makes it difficult to read Georgian, besides word order, are some verbs that have pretty similar short roots only differing in some vowels that surround those roots, while their meaning is entirely different, for example 'decide', 'tell', 'begin', forget' all look alike to me.

I'm sticking to the online newspaper "La prensa" for Papiamento, as it has mostly long news stories now, and they are really 'news". It's not uncommon for me to open a 'korant''s website and the most recent news to belong to the previous week or month. As for listening, I've started doing 3 videos instead of just 2 in the morning, while getting ready for work. IThe have mostly 2'30", so they won't make me show up late for work. It feels great to actually have C1 listening skills on a language. It's a language I understand nearly the way Cavesa understands French: unfocused, passing by, just picking up words in the air. I wish I reached this level for French, Norwegian and even English.

I got the correction for my Norwegian from the day before and they were minor corrections, involving style, word order and very few grammar mistakes. I still use mostly 'for' as finality while 'til' would do fine.

What I like about Clear Midsummers Night is the complexity of the characters' behavior. Apart from Lai Xue and Mo LIng Tian, nearly all have ups and downs, qualities and flaws. They do something good and then something bad, they have conflicts. It also helps havie a more natural idea of the language. What's more, I can understand most of what is being said and if it weren't for the ubiquous hardcoded Chinese subtitles I would say I can follow the story subtitlelessly.

At Hello Talk, no Chinese activity for the day. In the middle of the afternoon, my new Russian exchange partner sent me a request for 'language exchange' where we're supposed to write 250 characters in each language (Russian/English). I don't know how that works in the long term. At the top of the screen the bar is moving, like the life status of the fighters in a Mortal Combat-like videogame.

[Expugnator]

More Chinese chat today. I got do discuss really complex topics, looked up some words that I hope will join my active vocabulary.

The film I'm watching in French has some issues, the video isn't playing right, so I'm basically listening to it. I think my comprehension isn't that bad given that it's probably a Québecois film.

Finish the German film 'Victoria'. I'm not sure it deserves all the excelent reviews. Now i'm going to watch TV series and learn more consistently. It won't be as easy to get the series as I thought but I have enough material for a couple of months considering I might do 1 episode a week. I will keep my daily 10-minute quota and focus on the dialogues, which are probably going to be long in the series 'The Newsroom'.

I see some improvement with Russian. Both with the series and the book I'm listening/reading, and especially with the latter. Listening-reading is really a powerful feature. Even when it doesn't help you learn vocabulary, it increases the tolerance to the language. I used to read only 4 pages a day in Russian, bilingually, and now I listen-read 10 pages. It feels boring sometimes and it takes long, nearly a half-hour at my current book, but just by having sound to guide me I become exposed to much more daily language content than the previous times.

Reading Italian is a walk in the park, but I'm checking some words that insist to show up and which have broader meanings, so I have to know them in more contexts. I need to find time during the weekend to watch the three remaining films from Futurama's season 5, so I can proceed to the German DVDs I have for this series (and then obviously find something else for Italian).

Developping new techniques: today is Friday. As usual, I note down the materials I'm using and where I have to stop. Now I'm going to add a mark to the activities I have to find new materials for, which I do during the weekend. So, I'm watching a French movie and it's going to end somewhere next week (I watch 10 minutes a day). Therefore, I'm going to write an * after its title to remind me I have to get a new film this weekend. This will prevent me from running out of resources in the middle of the week. My time at my home computer has shrinked absurdly now. Same goes for the film in Georgian (currently Ant-Man, since it's dubbed and it's working wonders I watch 20 min a day, also because I'm watching dubbed films I'd be watching in English with Portuguese subtitles otherwise).

That's another topic: I have a routine with tasks that goes up to the Russian TV series and L/R'ed novel. What I do next I call "post-schedule", these are activities that I don't feel so sorry about if I don't do them a given day because I'll have done enough for my languages already. They are "extra" and I tend to run other "tracks", that is, learn from other ways than the ways I had already been doing along that day. So, for German I use Glossika. For Georgian, I watch a dubbed movie with subtitles in English (while earlier the day I watch a Georgian series without subtitles), I started reading Estonian intensively, I may even start a new language like Italian and so on. That's also when I write paragraphs in my target languages, which happens seldom, though. The idea is bringing variety, fun, doing other learning activities in a more flexible way. For example, before watching Georgian movies this time I used to watch Futurama dubbed in German. If I notice my Georgian comprehension has improved, I may try adding more Mandarin video, and so on.

I'm fascinated with how crystal clear the Georgian audio is in the Ant-Man film. It is even eligible for a subs2srs experiment, à la emk (though the Georgian transcript would have to be written down manually, as subtitles don't exist). All those years and now it feels great to be finally learning in an optimal way.

这个星期每天都下雨。不是大雨，可是有点儿冷。我去健身房的时候小雨比较冷，我没打雨伞，我的T恤没有袖子，所以我觉得不舒服。我来工作的时候又下雨，可是我是带雨伞的，没问题。连吃午饭的时候要带雨伞！我幸亏还没有在餐厅忘记我的伞。
我应该说今天读爱沙尼亚语的书我没注意。我累得把新句子听不懂，还没有那么努力学习。我希望下个星期一我能专注得多！