Mat's Language Log Attempt
Posted: Mon Oct 03, 2016 4:05 pm
I'm here because I want to draw on the collective and become a contributor to the forum. My aim is to document what I do each day/week and be active in the forums. I'll give a bit of an intro below and an account of how I've spent today and this past week.
I'm 30 years old now. I stumbled upon the old cite when I was fifteen or sixteen. I made a lot of flashcards, and I was suddenly doing much better in my French classes. I was taking Spanish classes too, which was very unusual at my high school in the States. I tried Latin as well, but I was absent the first two days of class. Apparently the class had already learned some tables of declensions and I didn't understand the concepts. The teacher worked at two high schools and said she had no time to work on me, and she said I was confused and had to drop Latin. I tried to get on with learning Spanish faster than french, and I was applying the grammar rules I'd learned to help me understand French. I made progress, but I always found myself interested in other languages and I wavered in my commitment to French and Spanish.
Five years later I had lost a good bit of my Spanish and French, then I started to relearn them on my own. I took German at my university, and I took Russian and Mandarin Chinese with a full schedule. At no point had I ever learned how to maintain all of my languages while improving one.
Jumping to the present, I can remember that I had dropped in and out of these forums quite a bit. Following people who had started on the site, then branched out to make YouTube videos etc. I followed all of Professor Arguelles's posts and videos, among others'. I tried many different techniques rather inconsistently. I let some aspects of my life get in the way with things that really matter to me. Language learning/using is something that I need to do for my own happiness.
I moved to China to focus on Mandarin. I've lived here going on five years. Two years ago I passed the HSK 6 exam, which is the highest test of Chinese Language given by the People's Republic of China (there are problems with the test I will admit, but it is not easy to pass). I've ignored my other languages here and there throughout this whole time, but for this past month I would say that I have been spreading my mental energies out more uniformly than ever before.
Here are the languages in which I have attained some degree of use that's worth mentioning, and some goals I have for them:
English: Native
French: B2 level, daily conversation, reading novels and classical texts
Spanish: B2 level, same as above
German: B2 level, same as above
Russian: B2 level, same as above
Mandarin: C1 level, same as above
Just started learning:
Turkish: A1 level, daily conversation, reading novels
Latin: ?? level, reading historical texts
Old English: ?? level, reading historical texts
Old Norse: ?? level, reading historical texts
Have studied to A2/B1 level before, but have only passive knowledge now:
Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Dutch, Egyptian Arabic, Tagalog, Japanese, Serbo-croatian
For the past month I have been working quite diligently. I was disappointed to see how far I had let things slip. I wanted to focus on French alone, but I couldn't help myself. Last year when I was in Europe, I had bought quite a few children's books in French and Spanish. They are the Goosebumps books (Chair de poule / Pesadillas). Motivated by Professor Arguelles's speech on reading in foreign languages given at the 2015 Polyglot Gathering (I had watched it a second time a month ago), I endeavored to read through one of these books with the English book on the side. I spent about a week on that book. Dealing with 20-30 page chunks at a time. Each day, I would work on one paragraph at a time, trying to use the English to help me interpret each word. Then I would reread the chapters twice more that day. And each day I reread what I had read before. I did this for the first book for a week. It was "The Haunted Mask."
I reread the book a few more times. I moved onto a second book that was in the series. I didn't use a dictionary, and it was a bit more difficult to follow in the beginning of the story. The third book was quite easy to read, I read it in two sittings (probably the same reading speed as I had read it the first time in fourth grade). It was just 130 pages long, and rather large print as well. I'd also been taking about 3 italki classes a week for conversational practice.
I've been doing about the same in Spanish and German, just less intensively. With Turkish, I've been plodding along with a textbook called Yeni Hittite and a reading book called Türkçe Okuyorum. I've made a few videos on Youtube of some of the readings. I also have a chat partner on italki. For Latin, I've been reading Lingva Latina Per Se Illustrata. For Old English, I've been plodding along in an old book I bought years ago called "The Threshold of Anglo-Saxon." I've also made a video of a reading, hoping someone would comment on my pronunciation. With Old Norse, I've been playing around with some old texts online as I can't seem to stomach through memorizing paradigms anymore. Russian has been on the back burner a bit. I live in China, so I use Mandarin Chinese everyday, although I need to put some work into it to improve because my level is not really tested.
This post has taken quite a while to produce. I'll update it tomorrow. Thanks for reading, if you have.
I'm 30 years old now. I stumbled upon the old cite when I was fifteen or sixteen. I made a lot of flashcards, and I was suddenly doing much better in my French classes. I was taking Spanish classes too, which was very unusual at my high school in the States. I tried Latin as well, but I was absent the first two days of class. Apparently the class had already learned some tables of declensions and I didn't understand the concepts. The teacher worked at two high schools and said she had no time to work on me, and she said I was confused and had to drop Latin. I tried to get on with learning Spanish faster than french, and I was applying the grammar rules I'd learned to help me understand French. I made progress, but I always found myself interested in other languages and I wavered in my commitment to French and Spanish.
Five years later I had lost a good bit of my Spanish and French, then I started to relearn them on my own. I took German at my university, and I took Russian and Mandarin Chinese with a full schedule. At no point had I ever learned how to maintain all of my languages while improving one.
Jumping to the present, I can remember that I had dropped in and out of these forums quite a bit. Following people who had started on the site, then branched out to make YouTube videos etc. I followed all of Professor Arguelles's posts and videos, among others'. I tried many different techniques rather inconsistently. I let some aspects of my life get in the way with things that really matter to me. Language learning/using is something that I need to do for my own happiness.
I moved to China to focus on Mandarin. I've lived here going on five years. Two years ago I passed the HSK 6 exam, which is the highest test of Chinese Language given by the People's Republic of China (there are problems with the test I will admit, but it is not easy to pass). I've ignored my other languages here and there throughout this whole time, but for this past month I would say that I have been spreading my mental energies out more uniformly than ever before.
Here are the languages in which I have attained some degree of use that's worth mentioning, and some goals I have for them:
English: Native
French: B2 level, daily conversation, reading novels and classical texts
Spanish: B2 level, same as above
German: B2 level, same as above
Russian: B2 level, same as above
Mandarin: C1 level, same as above
Just started learning:
Turkish: A1 level, daily conversation, reading novels
Latin: ?? level, reading historical texts
Old English: ?? level, reading historical texts
Old Norse: ?? level, reading historical texts
Have studied to A2/B1 level before, but have only passive knowledge now:
Portuguese, Italian, Catalan, Dutch, Egyptian Arabic, Tagalog, Japanese, Serbo-croatian
For the past month I have been working quite diligently. I was disappointed to see how far I had let things slip. I wanted to focus on French alone, but I couldn't help myself. Last year when I was in Europe, I had bought quite a few children's books in French and Spanish. They are the Goosebumps books (Chair de poule / Pesadillas). Motivated by Professor Arguelles's speech on reading in foreign languages given at the 2015 Polyglot Gathering (I had watched it a second time a month ago), I endeavored to read through one of these books with the English book on the side. I spent about a week on that book. Dealing with 20-30 page chunks at a time. Each day, I would work on one paragraph at a time, trying to use the English to help me interpret each word. Then I would reread the chapters twice more that day. And each day I reread what I had read before. I did this for the first book for a week. It was "The Haunted Mask."
I reread the book a few more times. I moved onto a second book that was in the series. I didn't use a dictionary, and it was a bit more difficult to follow in the beginning of the story. The third book was quite easy to read, I read it in two sittings (probably the same reading speed as I had read it the first time in fourth grade). It was just 130 pages long, and rather large print as well. I'd also been taking about 3 italki classes a week for conversational practice.
I've been doing about the same in Spanish and German, just less intensively. With Turkish, I've been plodding along with a textbook called Yeni Hittite and a reading book called Türkçe Okuyorum. I've made a few videos on Youtube of some of the readings. I also have a chat partner on italki. For Latin, I've been reading Lingva Latina Per Se Illustrata. For Old English, I've been plodding along in an old book I bought years ago called "The Threshold of Anglo-Saxon." I've also made a video of a reading, hoping someone would comment on my pronunciation. With Old Norse, I've been playing around with some old texts online as I can't seem to stomach through memorizing paradigms anymore. Russian has been on the back burner a bit. I live in China, so I use Mandarin Chinese everyday, although I need to put some work into it to improve because my level is not really tested.
This post has taken quite a while to produce. I'll update it tomorrow. Thanks for reading, if you have.