iguanamon wrote:Expugnator wrote:...it's like having Miguel Falabella playing a ladies' man's role...
. Ele diria que é um "verdadeiro deus nórdico", mas sim, ele nunca seria um "ladies man".
When you're ready for Swahili, Deutsche Welle's Learning By Ear site has a series of
radionovelas in Swahili with corresponding translations in
English,
French and
Portuguese for making parallel texts- free to download in pdf and mp3.
Your log continues to be an inspiration for us all, Expug.
Thank you. iguanamon! That's great news about the DW material, that shows I'm going to have LR material for Swahili at least at an A2 stage.
Systematiker wrote:When are you planning to start Swahili?
I don't know...When is it easier to drag Cavesa, Elenia or Brun Ugle into it? They say Swahili is scheduled for 2018, so my goal is not to let them wait that long
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On Friday, I turned on the next soundfile from "Che la festa comminci", to check if there had been any improvements. I played a file with a text I had already read, so it was easier. Overall, I think my listening skills improvement and my knowledge of the story made it easier to follow it now, but I still prefer to read the book intensively as it has much new vocabulary.
The weekend was productive language-wise but not exactly in terms of studying. On Saturday afternoon, we had what I consider the first meetup from the local Polyglot Club that was actually multilingual. I got to speak Mandarin for a long time with the guy who translated some episodes of Slow Chinese. He's been learning the language for one year but his pronunciation is much better than mine. He practices often with friends from Beijing. I managed to keep the conversation going for several minutes, occasionally resorting to a word or idiom in Portuguese. It was good to evaluate my shortcomings and once again to make me see how the lack of output is hindering my own progress. Then I spoke French with a group. There were French-speaking people before but people would just sit around the table and speak English all through it, not leaving room for other languages, and today it finally worked out to have multiple parallel conversations. One of the guys I spoke English to speaks intermediate Greek, which sounds promising. Another guy went there to speak German but we didn't have the chance to talk in German as he was talking to someone else in English and that would mean leaving that other guy out of the conversation.
Audiobook-wise, I solved my issues with material (temporarily. as I still have to decide with non-fiction book I'm doing next in Russian). I got the book "Adapt" which will replace "The Shallows" as my lunchtime listening. Then I surprisingly managed to find French audiobooks for some Brazilian books I was slowly reading in Portuguese. That is a real breakthrough because it means I'll be able to turn most of my non-language-related reading into language learning.
I managed to watch the first episode of The OA. I liked it. I want to keep watching it even if not as a language activity. After watching the first episode in the original English with Portuguese subtitles, I'm not sure I can take the voice-over Russian dubbing. I think I should keep watching just native Russian series, taking advantage of the sufficiently good automatic subtitles and of my growing skills. If later I notice I need to understand the dialogues more in depth, to finetune in order to reach a higher level, I'll then resort to dubbed series again.
As I move towards the end of "The Shallows", by Nicholas Carr, I thought I should share a quote by David Foster Wallace that is cited at that book:
David Foster Wallace wrote:Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.
I am faced with this issue on a daily basis. There is so much 'to read' or 'to watch' that everytime a resource is over I undergo a reflection upon to what should come next. I'm constantly collecting suggestions and finding new interests, and over the years I realized that when something is remarkable and mentioned by several sources I should take some notes as to make sure I'm going to do it next, or else I'll pick, for example, a book on a subject that is of lower priority just because it has been found more recently and is therefore fresher in memory. My own language studies are long mingled with my own overal knowledge studies, and even though I don't study any subjects systematically other than languages themselves, I have some fields I want to keep working on, and I don't want to repeat unnecessary stuff, for that matter. Every new 'slot', every resource that ends is a new window that opens in an attempt to become a more mature and understanding person.
Still working on Kuxnya with automatic subtitles. Today some excerpts weren confusing, but others were so clear that I didn't need subtitles at all.
although if all goes to plan I'll be busy starting actual school then, so maybe we should adjust a little...