Re: A Words Enthusiast
Posted: Mon Nov 20, 2017 4:20 pm
Really I'm just trucking along. The German translation comes in fits and starts, but it's easier every time.
Still doing classes for most of my Indonesian time. I had a short culture camp homestay through the school but since it was mostly Chinese students going with me I didn't stick at all to only Indonesian. Interesting hearing the host family's language as it wasn't Javanese but it seemed to be a more clipped and shortened Indonesian. Very quiet host family so not much conversation practice. Also Glossika and Anki on a mostly-regular schedule.
I met another language enthusiast at that camp, originally from Hungary. He kept listing off languages and I kept waiting for us to overlap but we never did. Arabic, Korean, Hindi, Turkish, Persian, Finnish... All languages I've never touched. He was very okay with forgetting languages after a while, but I can't say the same. Even in Russian or Polish, probably my rustiest languages, I still keep the life support on by reading something short now and then.
And then Mandarin. I did a short writing exercise for fun and got native corrections, which was nice. Every time I do this I'm told "This isn't how we would say it, but it's not wrong..." Well-meaning, sure, but I feel like I have to cajole a more natural sentence structure out of the native sometimes. Anyway a neat side effect: I spent about 30 minutes composing my little 300-character text, and at the end my brain was solidly in Chinese reading mode. I read a WeChat article afterward with almost no trouble. This is after quite a long time of only really practicing spoken Chinese, very little written. Good to know there's a sort of magic bullet for kickstarting my reading speed.
I did end up listening to some world radio at the gym the other day. In the course of an hour I think I hit Mandarin, Danish, Dutch, and German. And in these last three weeks I watched a few Easy Spanish videos as well.
Still doing classes for most of my Indonesian time. I had a short culture camp homestay through the school but since it was mostly Chinese students going with me I didn't stick at all to only Indonesian. Interesting hearing the host family's language as it wasn't Javanese but it seemed to be a more clipped and shortened Indonesian. Very quiet host family so not much conversation practice. Also Glossika and Anki on a mostly-regular schedule.
I met another language enthusiast at that camp, originally from Hungary. He kept listing off languages and I kept waiting for us to overlap but we never did. Arabic, Korean, Hindi, Turkish, Persian, Finnish... All languages I've never touched. He was very okay with forgetting languages after a while, but I can't say the same. Even in Russian or Polish, probably my rustiest languages, I still keep the life support on by reading something short now and then.
And then Mandarin. I did a short writing exercise for fun and got native corrections, which was nice. Every time I do this I'm told "This isn't how we would say it, but it's not wrong..." Well-meaning, sure, but I feel like I have to cajole a more natural sentence structure out of the native sometimes. Anyway a neat side effect: I spent about 30 minutes composing my little 300-character text, and at the end my brain was solidly in Chinese reading mode. I read a WeChat article afterward with almost no trouble. This is after quite a long time of only really practicing spoken Chinese, very little written. Good to know there's a sort of magic bullet for kickstarting my reading speed.
I did end up listening to some world radio at the gym the other day. In the course of an hour I think I hit Mandarin, Danish, Dutch, and German. And in these last three weeks I watched a few Easy Spanish videos as well.