Languid Language Learning

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Elenia
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Finnish?!
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Tue Aug 22, 2017 11:15 pm

DaveBee wrote:
Elenia wrote: I had my volunteering interview on Monday, which went really well. I will have my first shift this coming Thursday.

Do you know what you'll be doing?


For now I will be starting in the shop but will hopefully take on more responsibility once I get used to how the shop works, and will hopefully be able to use my Oxfam experience to help out.

---

Today I managed to not only listen to all eleven plus hours of Stolthet och fördom but also managed to crawl back on the Clozemaster wagon!
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Elenia
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Mon Sep 04, 2017 1:23 pm

Last week wasn't great. However, I was in contact with Swedish and Finnish every day. I did clozemaster for ten days up to Saturday, and then used Lingq on Sunday. I'm planning to do more lingqing today. I supplemented this with my Finnish grammar book, which I had a good browse through. I also realised that I have access to a perfect, modern Finnish text in the form of Minna Sundberg's A Redtail's Dream. She wrote this comic before Stand Still Stay Silent and it's just as gorgeous from the first page, so added plusses! I'm going through it slowly, one speech bubble at a time. I am just translating, not trying to figure out any grammar or anything. When I've had a good go out it under my own power, I look at the English version.

Other than that, I spoke a lot of Swedish on Saturday! I volunteered in the morning and only spoke a tiny bit of English. Then in the evening I met my boyfriend's maternal family at a birthday celebration so there was again lots of Swedish spoken there. When we were finally alone my boyfriend asked if I wanted to switch back to English as I was exhausted at that point and not doing very well. But I was apparently so tired that switching gears that late in the game would have been even harder, so we stayed in Swedish until we went to sleep. (About three minutes, but still).
7 x

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Elenia
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Sun Sep 10, 2017 11:21 am

Swedish and Finnish as standard. On Friday, I skyped with my German friend and actually spoke some German with her! It was stressful and difficult and made my head hurt, and I made lots of mistakes but she said my German has gotten better! WOO :D Thanks, Clozemaster!

While volunteering yesterday, I met a couple of volunteers who were customers in the shop. I had a chat with them, and it turned out that one of them is a French speaker from Tunisia, so we spoke in French a bit, too. My French is a bit of a train wreck right now, with me forgetting words and conjugations, but apparently my accent is good.

So I feel like I've won this week.
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby IronMike » Mon Oct 09, 2017 2:02 pm

Hey, you okay? Haven't read anything from you in a while. Hope all is alright!
0 x
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Elenia
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Tue Oct 17, 2017 5:21 pm

IronMike wrote:Hey, you okay? Haven't read anything from you in a while. Hope all is alright!


Thank you for checking up! I'm alright, although I have a teeny tiny cold :(

My language learning slackened, hence the lack of updates. I did keep Clozemaster going for a while, and I use Swedish often, but everything else has kind of fallen by the wayside.

My lowered interest in languages was balanced by a higher interest in knitting. This meant a lot of faffing around with yarn and youtube videos (which happens in English or in no language at all). However, I also felt a very strong need to find people to knit with and so I created a ravelry account and found a group that meet up twice monthly very close to where I live. I've only been once, but it was good to go, and the other knitters were very friendly. I'm looking forward to going again next week.

The past few weeks have been very busy indeed. My friend visited from Germany from the long weekend, and while we didn't speak much German together, I actually spoke a lot of Swedish while we were out and about. It was a great confidence boost. Of course I already knew that I was able to do what I needed to do in Swedish, but it was nice to be able to show off a bit and also to be able to shift for myself and someone else in the language. The day after my friend returned to Germany I went to France to visit my old collocatrice. My French has suffered so much! When I last visited in April, I could get on mostly fine. This time round, I could barely understand anything that was said to me, and was even hard pressed to reply. My friend had to translate for me much of the time. This is probably due to a lot of things, one of which is certainly the fact that my brain is very much used to speaking Swedish and doesn't want to be disturbed thank you very much. My French exposure has also been basically nothing in the past Idon'tevenwanttothinkhowlong. I want to change this, but right now have not much motivation to do so. This trip to France was under unhappy circumstances anyway, and many things reminded me of just how much I dislike it as a country. However, I did enjoy having larger bookshops to peruse, and bought the second book in the Imperial Radch series, L'Epée de l'ancillaire which I am enjoying.

Finally the day after I came back from France*, my mum came for a five day visit. It was really lovely to have her here, and we did a lot of walking around Malmö and Lund. Having my friend and my mum visit really made me feel even more at home here. It was good to be able to show them around the areas where I live and work. But these past two weeks (maybe more?) have included a LOT of walking and no actual rest time. I am exhausted, and sadly won't have a day to recharge until this weekend, at the earliest. I am due to start my main responsibilities as a volunteer leader at the Red Cross tomorrow, and I am extremely nervous. The lady I will be inducting tomorrow is an English speaker, so language is definitely not going to be an issue, but I am very conscious of the fact that I really don't know about everything that happens in the shop. It should't be a problem, but I am worried nonetheless.

Finally, I have heard a few people speaking Finnish around me! It has been nice to recognise that it is Finnish being spoken. I am really looking forward to getting stuck back in with the language.

*Not really, as I landed at midnight and didn't get back to Sweden until about ten to one in the morning of the day that my mum arrived.
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Ani
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Ani » Wed Oct 18, 2017 12:52 am

Lovely to hear your update! I miss knitting. I should dig up my old rav account..
1 x
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Elenia
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Fri Oct 20, 2017 11:16 am

A tiny bit of news:

I skyped with my German friend yesterday. We were knitting together using Arne & Carlos' Regia Pairfect yarn, and my friend was stuck in the cuff phase which gets boring, fast. Her cuff is green, so she started singing a children's song about it: Grün, grün, grün sind alle meine Kleider. She asked if we ever learnt colour songs like that (not that I remember), and sent me the link to it, so now I know how to say my clothes are green, red, blue, white, black or multicoloured!



I also managed to speak a few German sentences! I told her about one of my purchases from the day before, an edition suhrkamp copy of Die Driegroschenoper by Bertolt Brecht. I had quite a bit of trouble forming the sentences, but made minimal mistakes, so I was extremely proud of myself. She says I've gotten better again, and I told her I have absolutely no idea how as I have done no studying at all. I'll take it either way though!
6 x

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Elenia
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Fri Oct 20, 2017 2:05 pm

Also: I've just realised that somehow, while I wasn't paying attention, I almost completed my goal of 3000 audiobook minutes for Swedish! Yay!

I think I've actually surpassed that, but I only record an audiobook when it's finnished, to keep things simple. I'm wondering what I should do next. I picked audiobooks because they were simple to track, but I guess I can figure out how many podcasts I've listened to, and do a similar thing for podcasts? I think I would really like to listen to a few hundred lecture hours, but I have previously found it hard (almost impossible) to find free, quality lectures in Swedish.
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Fri Oct 20, 2017 9:52 pm

Elenia wrote:Also: I've just realised that somehow, while I wasn't paying attention, I almost completed my goal of 3000 audiobook minutes for Swedish! Yay!


3000 minutes... 50 hours... not bad! What do you listen to?

Elenia wrote:I think I would really like to listen to a few hundred lecture hours, but I have previously found it hard (almost impossible) to find free, quality lectures in Swedish.


I think you can find lectures on SVT24, URPlay and probably on Sveriges Radio as well (P1 is most likely, but P4 may have something of interest).
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Elenia
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Re: Languid Language Learning

Postby Elenia » Sat Oct 21, 2017 2:07 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:
Elenia wrote:Also: I've just realised that somehow, while I wasn't paying attention, I almost completed my goal of 3000 audiobook minutes for Swedish! Yay!


3000 minutes... 50 hours... not bad! What do you listen to?


In length order:

  • Odinsbarn (which makes up the lion's share at an impressive 1,341 minutes)
  • Stolthet och fördom - 681 mins
  • Charmen med tarmen - 445 mins
  • Sommarboken - 270 mins
  • Pippi Långstrump - 207 mins
  • Vargtimman - 17 mins

Of those, I'd read Odinsbarn, Pippi Långstrump and Sommarboken first. I've also read Stolthet och fördom in Swedish before listening to an audiobook version, but that was in a different translation.

I'm currently listening to Freja, the first book in the Saga om Valhalla series.

Elenia wrote:I think I would really like to listen to a few hundred lecture hours, but I have previously found it hard (almost impossible) to find free, quality lectures in Swedish.

jeff_lindqvist wrote:I think you can find lectures on SVT24, URPlay and probably on Sveriges Radio as well (P1 is most likely, but P4 may have something of interest).


Thank you! I will check them out :D

---

So:

After yesterday's post, I listened to a coupke of minutes of weird Finnish children's TV for exposure. I could understand some of the words I could see in the subtitles but certainly not fast enough. It reminded me of something I did way back when in 2014, before Finnish was even a glint in my eye. I watched a nine minute children's cartoon and google translated every single word. I watched it over and over again until I understood it. Maybe I should do something similar for one of these Finnish shows? I know much less Finnish than I did Swedish at that point, but the shows are much shorted (the longest was about 3-4 mins and contained a dance sequence) so I should be able to last through an entire one. A plus point is that figuring out any Finnish sentence gives ample opportunity to find out more about the grammar.

Aside from that, I recorded myself reading aloud from Rent Spel by Tove Jansson. In the previous recordings I've made, I strived to be perfect, and restart if I fluff something or make a mistake. But it just wasn't going that way with this one, so I just powered on through. It's ended up being about eleven minutes long, so I've added that to my challenge. I also returned to LWT and read a bit more with that yesterday evening and this morning. I think I will try to get through approximately one 100 word chunk of text a day for the next week.

Finally, we went to a friend's house last night and made pinnbröd. We didn't have a fire, or sticks to stick our bread bits on, so we just fried them instead and ate them with hot lingonsoppa. This particular friend wants to make me as Swedish as possible, so she also gave me a tefat that I can pulka with. She suggested a potential trip to do just that, and we thought maybe we can do pinnbröd the right way at that time. Finally, she gave me a few lessons in bugg, Swedish swing. We spoke a mixture of Swedish and English, which became quite difficult when she was telling me what to do with my feet. I have a hard enough time coordinating them anyway, let alone coordinating them in Swedish!
2 x


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