Language log

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
David27
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Re: Language log

Postby David27 » Thu Jul 23, 2020 4:55 pm

I wasn’t a fan of 2033, but the completionist in me is forcing me to eventually finish it (I’ve slogged through 560 pages in the last year on and off, so will be able to finish eventually). For getting used to older Russian, Chekhov is a good place to start because they are short stories, but some are comedy or political in nature and I find more difficult to grasp. I could recommend some to start (I have a list of stories I enjoy at home). In the meantime the lady with the dog and house with a mezzanine (I think that’s the translation) and ionich are good places to start. I also love Master and Margarita as all time favorite. I’ve read in English, Russian, watched the Russian series of it on YouTube twice, and I’ve been itching to read it again lately (maybe my next Russian book).
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David1917
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Re: Language log

Postby David1917 » Fri Jul 24, 2020 2:34 am

David27 wrote:I wasn’t a fan of 2033, but the completionist in me is forcing me to eventually finish it (I’ve slogged through 560 pages in the last year on and off, so will be able to finish eventually). For getting used to older Russian, Chekhov is a good place to start because they are short stories, but some are comedy or political in nature and I find more difficult to grasp. I could recommend some to start (I have a list of stories I enjoy at home). In the meantime the lady with the dog and house with a mezzanine (I think that’s the translation) and ionich are good places to start. I also love Master and Margarita as all time favorite. I’ve read in English, Russian, watched the Russian series of it on YouTube twice, and I’ve been itching to read it again lately (maybe my next Russian book).


Thanks for the rec, I'll have a look at Ionych - I usually associate Chekhov with plays so I didn't even think about that. I know all the others have short stories as well, so that's an option it just depends on if audio is available for at least the first handful. Master & Margarita is truly one of the best books of all time and I look forward to reading it in Russian. My goal is to be able to pick it up and read straight through once I've done this "L-R" method with a bunch of other stuff.
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David1917
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Re: Language log

Postby David1917 » Sun Jul 26, 2020 4:13 am

Yesterday I had a big language day. I did a little bit of everything I think: some Persian from Hillmann (which I might finally be fed up with), a chapter in the DeFrancis Chinese Reader, annotated a story in Dichter, Denker, und Erzähler, studied a chapter in TYS Hindi 2003, Icelandic Linguaphone 17-10 & 3, a set of exercises in LLPSI Exercita Latina, Polish TYS Chapter 16 & Cornish KDL Lesson 9. Maybe more I'm forgetting.

Today I reformatted my out-of-use excel sheet that I want to try and track things in. Not only to be free from posting things like "Maybe more I'm forgetting" but also to keep track of where I am in my rotation. Once school kicks in I might only be able to devote something like 30 minutes per day for *language* - not 30 minutes per language as I am now. To that end I set up a cycle and basically I'll do as much as I can each day, but it might be several days before I get back to the beginning. Some appear in the cycle multiple times so they'll get more frequency even this way. We'll see how this works out, but now that I've got the hang of the program, everything is online, and I only have one proper class while the rest is thesis writing, I'm sure I'll be able to divert my attention here & there.

So from the sheet I can now say for certain that today I did:

-Russian Word Lists for Chapter 28 in the Langenscheidt book
-Icelandic Linguaphone Lessons 18-11, 4; and annotated Lesson 19 for tomorrow
-Polish TYS Chapter 16. The exercise sections are starting to get much longer so I can usually read the chapter and do the first set of exercises one day, and the second set the next day. The past tense conjugates more than the Russian one which just declines for gender, this has gender AND person. Oh the humanity! This might put a damper in my plan to finish all 41 lessons by August 17 :(
-Persian Polyakov Lesson 3 section 5. This book is not without its flaws and idiosyncracies but I think this is going to be the one for me right now. It's simply called Самоучитель Персидского Языка and it's actually quite delightful in that it starts in Moscow. So the first text is about the old and beautiful city, the wide boulevards like Tverskaya, the Red Square and Kremlin walls, and the Sparrow Hills on which (our) university, named for Lomonosov, is located. I've listened to the audio of the whole thing a zillion times (as part of a Persian 6WC a year or so ago) and I know we end up in Tehran later on in the book. The format of each lesson is ideal and extremely thorough: one grammar point, example sentences to translate into Russian, exercises to translate Russian into Persian, next grammar point, and so on. Then a quite substantial reading or dialogue - the main flaw being the narrator who reads everything flat as fast as he can, getting out of breath at weird parts of a sentence. Then in some lessons a few more grammar points & exercises followed by a second related text. Then some questions on the text and a writing prompt that mirrors the text. Obviously, this comes from the Russian school of rote learning that horrifies us in America, and I don't necessarily do *all* of the exercises, especially for constructions I already understand quite well. But what this will do is serve as a way to clean up the grammar points I might still be iffy on and get in some good reading practice and build up more vocabulary.
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cjareck
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Re: Language log

Postby cjareck » Sun Jul 26, 2020 6:11 am

Yes, Polish past tense may be complicated, but it will be useful also for the future tense of unfinished activities. Look
- robił - he was doing - unfinished past
- zrobił - he did - finished past
- będzie robił - he will be doing - unfinished future
- zrobi - he will do - finished future

For the unfinished future (I don't know the exact grammar term neither in English nor in Polish) you need "będzie" and a conjugated verb in past past tense. You may even simplify it more by using "bezokolicznik" - będzie robić - but you need context to make it clear who is the doer of the action. It also seems to be incorrect even if used by the native speakers.
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David1917
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Re: Language log

Postby David1917 » Tue Aug 04, 2020 3:51 pm

I had some travel obligations last week/weekend so missed several days of proper work. Before leaving though I completed:

Russian - Rep round for the Wordlist of Langenscheidt's chapter 28, and creating and reviewing chapter 29. I've just now created a WL for chapter 30 meaning I'm finally done with this little book. Translating articles from 1917 begins this week I suppose. Also completed L-R for chapter 3 of Мы

German - Did at least one new story in Dichter, Denker, und Erzähler

Chinese - Completed chapters 25 and 26 in the DeFrancis reader

Persian - Finished all the exercises in Chapter 3 of the Polyakov book, on to the first textual passage hopefully today

Icelandic - Linguaphone lessons 19-12, 20 annotated; Langenscheidt completed the readings and grammar in Chapter 3, did the first 3 Übungen which involved a lot of great grammatical manipulation.

Polish - Completed Chapter 17 of the TYS book. Since I lost those several days I definitely will not finish Chapter 41 by August 17 unless I do more than one chapter per day, which is not something I think would be a good use of time. Still hoping to complete it early on in the semester and switch to more passive methods with this such as shadowing

Cornish - I did Lesson 10, which was a review of the previous 4 lessons and just provided about 20 sentences to translate into Cornish. I struggled with it and realized my grammar sheet was not comprehensive enough. Apparently I just thought I'd magically remember certain points so the next day I went back through the first 9 lessons and added to my sheet. Today I'll try to redo those sentences and move on.

I also picked up the Yiddish Assimil and did Lessons 9-2 and completed the Exercises & read the Colloquia for Chapter 4 of LLPSI.

Onward!
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David1917
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Re: Language log

Postby David1917 » Sat Aug 08, 2020 2:32 am

Russian - I completed the review of the Wordlist from Chapter 30 of the Langenschiedt book. Today, I re-read through Chapters 1-20 and just put a red asterisk on the words from my wordlists that I still had to consult. When I do the last 10 tomorrow I'll get a full count of those that didn't stick. Today, for example, a lot included types of trees, animals, and crops to be found in Siberia. Obviously one exposure to each of those isn't going to stick right away, but a lot of the verbs and things that built off other roots I already knew were pretty clear. Research starts this week. I've definitely been slacking on typing up the microfilm articles that I need so, school is going to suck for a couple of weeks :lol:

German - Today I started trying to get through annotating a story from DDE but was feeling burnt out about halfway through.

Chinese - Chapters 27 and 28 in DeFrancis

Icelandic - Yesterday I completed lessons 20-13 and 6 in Linguaphone

Latin - LLPSI Ch 5
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David1917
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Re: Language log

Postby David1917 » Sun Sep 06, 2020 3:44 am

As I expected, the first couple weeks of the semester caused language learning to be put on hold. I did a little bit here and there, especially Russian for research of course.

The last few days I've dug some time back into my schedule to focus on languages. I'll basically do a chapter of reading, one language, another chapter, another language, grade 10 papers, another language, etc.

Most significantly I've made progress in Chinese - finishing today lesson 33 in the DeFrancis book moving me into Volume 2. This is all technically review, though I haven't looked at this book in particular or Chinese in general for a long time. I made a sheet to jot down any characters that didn't immediately pop into my head upon seeing them, as well as the combinations. Of the 330 characters in the first 33 lessons, I only needed to jot down 17 of them - and at least 3 were ones I "knew" but either in their simplified forms or forgot the tone. The 40 lessons in this reader present the 400 most common characters (at least as of the 1950s) so that's good to know I'm on that track. I had 59 combinations written down - out of the roughly 8-900 I should have covered so far (the introduction says there are 1,250 combinations which makes an average of 3.1 combos per character - at this point, 330 characters should be 990 but I'm pretty sure that later in the book there are a higher number of combos so, it's probably less than 990 so far).

Today I noted Lesson 25 in Linguaphone Icelandic and did lessons 24-17, 10, & 3. I've done a little bit with the Langenscheidt book too, but nothing noteworthy. Things are starting to come together here.

I tried to pick back up the very excellent TYS Polish book the other day, but having been gone from it for a couple of weeks it was rough going since I haven't really cemented that language in my head properly. I will instead switch to Assimil Le Polonais Sans Peine since it's easier to sneak in 15 min of that here and there rather than a 30-40 minute TYS lesson.

German & Persian are supposed to be my other 2 "daily" languages, and I've done some stuff with the Polyakov book, but nothing with German. Which is completely stupid because I need it for research the second half of the semester and for my Nordic exploration; plus I will probably need Yiddish for my eventual PhD. So maybe I'll get back to doing that tomorrow...

Oh, and because I just couldn't help myself, I started listening to Language Transfer Greek on my walk this morning. So that's a great decision I made. :mrgreen:

Rock on people!
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David1917
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Re: Language log

Postby David1917 » Sat Dec 12, 2020 5:02 am

LOL

Let's take it from the top.

Russian - I completed a draft of the first chapter of my MA thesis which required reading and analyzing something like 50? articles from Nikolai Bukharin ("the darling of the party") during late 1916 through to October 1917. I re-watched the show Trotsky as part of this research, as well as the hilarious film Autumn Marathon for a seminar in Soviet studies. No real "studying" but lots of usage this semester.

Nothing else was touched - an article in French here, a reference to something in German there, but that's it. Mostly expected. I listened to a handful of Language Transfer Greek episodes on morning walks while the weather held out, and would like to get back to that sort of "light" study of things.

Break began on Monday. Since then we've got:

Persian - Using the FSI course. I got a hardcopy of the book at a used bookstore for $5 so flipping between the pages of actual Persian and the grammatical notes is much easier than scrolling back and forth. I still have half a mind to rewrite the whole course in Persian for the Yojik site. Either way, it's good so far. I'm halfway through Unit 2.

German - I listened to two chapters in Der Vorleser the other night twice each while reading the English and then German.

Old English - Began the Programmatic Course by Barbara Raw which seems very promising.

Break ends January 25. Goal is to actually finish some damn courses. I'd like to complete the Old English course, the Persian FSI course, the Cornish KDL course, and the Icelandic Linguaphone course (currently on L28 so, only 22 remain with 45 days to go!) So that when I graduate in May, I can hopefully put these to use in some other way and/or start more new languages.
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David1917
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Re: Language log

Postby David1917 » Thu Dec 31, 2020 4:40 am

2020 in review:

David1917 wrote:I know that I will be in Czechia, Germany, Poland, and France in May. I will also likely end up using Icelandair which will give me a layover in Reykjavik. So, one resolution can be to speak Icelandic with an Icelandic person. Even one transaction in the airport on a layover after having casually studied the language for a few months is a decent little goal. Speaking as much German and French as possible is a given, and perhaps I need to choose which Slavic language will be my second ASAP, so I can add that to the list.


LOL

After my research trip to Russia, where I'll have been there for at least a couple weeks speaking Russian every day and reading documents all day, I'd like to carry that momentum forward and resolve to finally read a full novel in Russian. In this case I'm choosing Master and Margarita.


LOL

In general, I should try to actually *use* my languages more. Instead of eavesdropping on people speaking languages I study, I need to just try to speak (while maintaining degrees of politeness - I'm not going to interrupt a man making a business call in Hindi to tell him how much I like samosas). Maybe I should say I need to speak with a native of every language I have a good enough foundation in.


LOL

Finally, I emphatically and wholeheartedly resolve not to stop buying and hoarding random language-learning books off of eBay and Abe.


Well at least this one was easy to keep in the covid times. I even had to buy a second bookshelf just for language books.
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David1917
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Re: Language log

Postby David1917 » Mon May 10, 2021 5:11 am

David1917 wrote:Let's take it from the top.

Russian - I completed a draft of the first chapter of my MA thesis which required reading and analyzing something like 50? articles from Nikolai Bukharin ("the darling of the party") during late 1916 through to October 1917. I re-watched the show Trotsky as part of this research, as well as the hilarious film Autumn Marathon for a seminar in Soviet studies. No real "studying" but lots of usage this semester.

So I read, translated, and analyzed every article Bukharin wrote from 1916-1917, as well as several pieces in Pravda up until 1921. I also finally read some full books in Russian this semester - two biographies of Bukharin and a collection of conference papers held in the USSR after his rehabilitation in the 1980s. Reading a full book was always a "someday" goal and when these showed up through Interlibrary Loan, "someday" showed up real quick. Being extremely familiar with the subject matter certainly made it easier, but yeah. Nice to finally check that off the list.

I also had an internship this semester which involved translating Pravda articles on Cold War topics and annotating them for a high school audience with discussion questions.

Also got a Youtube subscription to the Russian Premier Liga and been watching Спартак whoop some asses with Russian commentary.

So, lots of Russian these last few months, except for speaking :(

Nothing else was touched - an article in French here, a reference to something in German there, but that's it. Mostly expected. I listened to a handful of Language Transfer Greek episodes on morning walks while the weather held out, and would like to get back to that sort of "light" study of things.

Morning walks and LT Greek have forced me to study Greek for realsies. I'm up to Lesson 85. I think this will be a Free-Legal-Challenge. Once the LT is done, do the Cortina course and then the FSI Basic which seems to be extremely comprehensive. I'm not overly concerned with dialects since I'm not going to Greece anytime soon and can work that stuff out later.

As for the other stuff, gonna ramp it all back up. Also adding Japanese. I want to learn Korean, too, but haven't been able to find the resources I'd like to use yet.

I have a "shadowing" regimen, a "reading" regimen, a "listening-reading" regimen, and a "pen & paper" regimen. These vary daily based on the environment at home and my other responsibilities. It's a lot of daily work when all added up and very rarely will I get to it all. But it's just a way to organize my goals.

I honestly find it fun to listen to 7 languages in a row and slowly grow to understand them. It's more about gaining a wide passive knowledge for me right now until an opportunity to travel presents itself. My next trip will probably be to Costa Rica (or Russia whenever they allow us in) neither of which require substantial language preparation. So if a 2022 vaca manifests itself, I'll readjust then. The only other contingency is applying to a PhD program which, based on my current research paths, would require either learning Yiddish or Georgian; or a job I just applied for that would like a knowledge of Turkish.

Obviously I would love to devote 10 hours/day to doing all of this but it's just not going to happen. I have bolded the most important ones, so when I have to start cutting things out each day, these don't suffer.

Shadowing:
Arabic: Linguaphone, Assimil 1st Gen, Assimil 2nd Gen.
French: Assimil Using French; might ditch this and review French Without Toil since it's less slangy.
Yiddish: Assimil
Polish: Assimil
Icelandic: Linguaphone
Hungarian: Assimil
Japanese: Linguaphone
Greek: Language Transfer *Not shadowing really but falls more into the listening category

Reading:
Russian: Various articles, translating & annotating
Chinese: DeFrancis series
German: Dichter, Denker, und Erzähler Collection
Persian: Учебник персидского языка by Поляков and Носырев. It's a little rough going.
Spanish: Carlos Ruiz Zafon La Sombra del Viento

Listening-Reading:
Russian: Evegenii Zamiatin We, next maybe Boris Pasternak Dr Zhivago
French: Albert Camus L'etranger, next ???French books like this, or magical realist stuff???
German: Bernard Haitink Der Vorleser, next Patrick Süskind Das Parfum

Pen & Paper:
Persian: FSI Basic Course, yes it's an AudioLingual but I'm writing out some pattern drills in Persian
Latin: LLPSI
Hindi: TYS 2 generations
Cornish: KDL Grade 1
Old English: Programmatic Course
Icelandic: Langenscheidts Lehrbuch

Hot damn.
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