Kimchizzle's Spanish, French, Dutch and other adventures

Continue or start your personal language log here, including logs for challenge participants
User avatar
kimchizzle
Orange Belt
Posts: 124
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 12:05 am
Languages: English (N), French
Studying Spanish, Dutch, Russian
On the radar, Estonian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, Korean, Swedish
Language Log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.org/vi ... f=15&t=779
x 149

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby kimchizzle » Tue Aug 11, 2015 4:58 am

My language focus has changed since I started this log. Now my primary focus is Spanish. I would really like to get it to B2 in all four areas of comprehension with Spanish. My reason for changing my primary language focus from Russian to Spanish is simply that I'm having a lot more fun and enjoying studying Spanish more. Russian was really causing headaches for me with a different alphabet, grammar that is very different from my native language and words that looked too similar to my eyes confusing me. I'm not giving up on Russian just devoted less time per day to it and more time to Spanish.

I've been thinking about beginning to start a fourth language to study. I have some time and I don't have to study it extremely hard, I could make it a long-term project that I work on little by little everyday, sort of how Russian has become for me. Part of the reason I have time, is less time devoted to Russian, but also, my French studies is mostly only extensive reading and listening, and occasionally intensive reading. So it is easy to fit in throughout the day. I'll write the languages I'm thinking about as a fourth language and try to give an explanation why I may choose it.

Korean I'm quite comfortable and confident with the Korean alphabet even in writing. Much much more so than even with the Russian alphabet. I have tried to learn Korean twice over the past several years but I think my methods were pretty bad for my personality. Mostly used flashcards and Anki, and I've forgotten most things. Also I got discouraged by the honorifics, because all learning materials start by teaching the most polite honorific, and I just wanted the honorific I could use with friends. I understand honorifics are a huge part of Korean culture though, even more so than in Japanese I think, so it is something a foreign learner needs to learn, I just get impatient wanting to learn conjugations I can use with friends. I think the language is cool and I have a number of Korean and Korean-American friends.

Cantonese My reasons aren't very good for this one, but I really want to learn the language at some point. I've been to Hong Kong and stayed with a family before and the mom didn't speak any English, so I learned a few phrases. I really enjoy Hong Kong, but I probably shouldn't study this language next due to time constraints.

Indonesian I like that the language is written in Latin alphabet with few diacritical marks, unlike Vietnamese or even Polish and Czech. I would like to give this language a shot one day.

Estonian This has always been a language I wanted to learn even though I understand the grammar is very complex, more so than Russian I believe. But at least Estonian uses the Latin alphabet which is a plus over Russian for me personally. I traveled to Estonia while I lived in France to visit a friend and I loved the country and the people. I also like the idea of learning a language with only around 1,000,000 native speakers in a way. If I had to choose a non-Indo-European language, I should probably choose this compared to the other two. Also, Estonian girls. ;)

Swedish I used to have lots of Swedish friends in college, and I also think the language was really cool and would be fun to learn. Swedish people are really fun to hang out with and nice to talk to. Another reason I want to learn Swedish so much is a Swede I once knew told me there isn't any point for me to learn Swedish, and I am so lucky to be a native English speaker. What a strange thing to say. :P Anyways, the only Swedish words I remember are kjol and tack. I learned kjol from a dictionary over six years ago because I thought the word looked interesting with the kj next to each other, and I never forgot the meaning since.

Dutch I've become increasingly interested in Dutch for some time. It is an interesting language to me because I find similarities with it and English but also German. It seems like a bit in between the two in some ways.

Haitian Creole I think Iguanamon has convinced me that I will have to learn Hatian Creole one day after I realized how similar the vocabulary was to French. The grammar also seems pretty interesting.

Italian This is a language I probably have the best shot at getting to a high level due to my solid Romance language foundation. But I think it may be too similar to Spanish and I wonder about interference. I'm not totally sure interference would be a problem with me personally, since I never had any interference issues between French and Spanish, vocabulary wise.

Catalan Another Romance language and perhaps a better choice than Italian due to less similarities with Spanish, I believe. Catalan has interested me for awhile and I enjoy the history of the language as well. It has some similarities with French, which would be cool. Also since it is a Romance language, I think I could learn at a faster pace than with some other languages, due to grammar and vocabulary similarities shared with French and Spanish, although I would have to pay attention the false-cognate and grammar that is not the same and learn those cases well.

Ukrainian I'm sure I want choose this language next but I thought I would write it anyways. One of my reasons for learning Russian actually was so I could use Russian language texts to learn Ukrainian from. I think there would be way too many similarities between Russian to learn now, and also I'm struggling with Russian so much, it would be quite silly to try another Slavic language at the same time. Also Ukrainian has a bit different Cyrillic alphabet than the Russian one.

--------

French I read some more of Père Goriot today. I learned a new word, rafistoler and I have no idea if it is an old-fashioned word or if people still use it. I think the word is really cool, cause it has a neat look and sound to me. 8-) One problem about reading 19th century novels in a foreign language is a foreigner never can easily tell how rare or out of date a new word learned is. I would love to use rafistoler in my writing or speech sometime, but I'm afraid people may tell me I have the speech of a very old man. lol I've actually had that happen before, I used words I learned from a novel and people were shocked a foreigner even knew such a word, and they also told me I sound like an old man talking if I use such a word. Perhaps though, that can be my legacy to the French language, I just use old-fashioned slang and words from Balzac novels in everyday conversation, in an attempt to bring them back in style. :lol:

I really enjoy reading Balzac, he is very fun to read as a foreigner because he loves to go overboard with descriptions, so it can be good for vocabulary. You just need a higher level of reading comprehension to understand at first, more so than many other French authors, except for Proust perhaps. What a native speaker likely finds redundant and tedious when reading Balzac, I find very enjoyable.

I will try to give some examples of Balzac's passion for description.

Ce jeune malheur ressemblait à un arbuste aux feuilles jaunies, fraîchement planté dans un terrain contraire. Sa physonomie roussâtre, ses cheveux d'un blond fauve, sa taille trop mince, exprimaient cette grâce que les poètes modernes trouvaient aux statuettes du Moyen Age. Ses yeux gris mélangés de noir exprimaient une douceur, une résignation chrétiennes. Ses vêtements simples, peu coûteux, trahissaient des formes jeunes. Elle était jolie par juxtaposition. Heureuse, elle eût été ravissante : le bonheur est la poésie des femmes, comme la toilette en est le fard. Si la joie d'un bal eût refleté ses teintes rosées sur ce visage pâle; si les douceurs d'une vie élegante eussent rempli, eussent vermillonné ces joues déjà légèrement creusées; si l'amour eût ranimé ces yeux tristes, Victorine aurait pu lutter avec les plus belles jeunes filles.


Aussi Balzac likes to use a pattern of lots of verbs one after another sometimes for effect.

Si quelque serrure allait mal, il l'avait bientôt démontée, rafistolée, huilée, limée, remontée, en disant: ça me connaît.


If you don't know enough words, a sentence like that could be tortuous for a foreigner, but it is good learning if you don't know only one or two. Also, it is good instruction on style, a foreigner could learn to create sentences like that in their own written stories.

Spanish Just doing Duolingo and FSI. FSI is really great. I tried to watch just a small part of a telenovela after doing FSI today and the words didn't seem all jumbled up. I could hear lots of individual words, but my comprehension was still low. I plan to write in Spanish some here sometime in the future. Also in the FSI lessons, I can't figure out if my ears are playing tricks on me or what, but it seems Spanish speakers tend to swallow vowels in certain scenarios and it sounds sorta French like. For example, Dónde está el hotel? It sounds closer to, Dónde está 'l'hotel, where the e in el is dropped the a on está combines with the l sound, and the l sound combines with hotel. Also I notice a similar case with, Dónde está la embajda? It sounds almost like the French definite article before a vowel, like Dónde está l'embajada?

I can't tell is the vowels are actually being swallowed in Spanish and disappear completely or if they just become softer and quieter and I can't hear them in native speech.
0 x
Spanish Duolingo: 42 / 100 Dutch Duolingo: 4 / 100
Feel free to help correct any of my languages, except my native tongue. :shock:

Arnaud
Blue Belt
Posts: 984
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 11:57 am
Location: Paris, France
Languages: Native: French
Intermediate: English, Russian, Italian
Tourist : Breton, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish, Latin
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=1524
x 2172

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby Arnaud » Tue Aug 11, 2015 5:13 am

deleted
Last edited by Arnaud on Tue Sep 13, 2016 5:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
1 x

User avatar
Hekje
Posts: 7
Joined: Wed Jul 29, 2015 11:59 pm
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Languages: N: English
Learning: Dutch (intermediate), Spanish (beginner)
Backburner: French, Indonesian (beginner)
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... f=15&t=905
x 11

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby Hekje » Wed Aug 12, 2015 1:41 am

Thanks for stopping by my log! Best of luck to you on your journey with Russian and Spanish. They seem like freaking awesome languages. :)
0 x

User avatar
kimchizzle
Orange Belt
Posts: 124
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 12:05 am
Languages: English (N), French
Studying Spanish, Dutch, Russian
On the radar, Estonian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, Korean, Swedish
Language Log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.org/vi ... f=15&t=779
x 149

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby kimchizzle » Thu Aug 13, 2015 4:17 pm

I'll write something short here now and then write a longer post later. I haven't made an entry here in a few days and I need to try to log my experiences everyday if I can. I've been a bit lazy though.

So I decided to choose Dutch as my fourth language to study. I like the language so far. I notice many similarities with both English and German. One thing I like about Dutch compared to say German is that it seems to be a mostly SVO language. I never liked German being SOV sometimes. It looks like Dutch has many cognates with English which is nice and the words that are not English cognates are often German cognates, like de himmel hemel. I'm sure there are tons are purely Dutch words too, but my study materials are just using cognate words for beginner's I guess. I choose Dutch because it had a Duolingo course and FSI. Also Dutch is has a good number of speakers, so resources aren't very difficult to find. My original choice for a new language was Catalan, but I wasn't able to find enough resources in English, so I chose Dutch instead.

My French studies the past few days has only consisted of extensive reading of Père Goriot. It may be beneficial to read some pages intensively sometimes, but I've been too lazy. One thing about Père Goriot is that it has absolutely no chapters, it is only divided up into parts with part 1 being 100 pages long. Lol :shock: I'm fairly certain the English translation I read was divided into chapters. So anyways, it makes reading a bit harder since I'm a person who likes to stop reading at the end of chapters and not in between pages, yet I'm not going to read 100 pages of Balzac because of time constraints.

FSI is really helping my fluency. Problem is, it is only being helped with the small vocabulary in the drills along with my own small pool of active vocabulary. I need to activate more of my vocabulary, maybe a chat app for chatting with native Spanish speakers, then looking for speaking practice later.

I've been too lazy about Russian. I plan to suspend some of my anki cards for verbs like, invest and acquire that I keep forgetting and are not so useful to me as a beginner.
0 x
Spanish Duolingo: 42 / 100 Dutch Duolingo: 4 / 100
Feel free to help correct any of my languages, except my native tongue. :shock:

User avatar
kimchizzle
Orange Belt
Posts: 124
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 12:05 am
Languages: English (N), French
Studying Spanish, Dutch, Russian
On the radar, Estonian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, Korean, Swedish
Language Log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.org/vi ... f=15&t=779
x 149

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby kimchizzle » Fri Aug 14, 2015 3:32 am

Russian I need to find more motivation for Russian. I think Anki caused my motivation to drop quite a lot. I only added 750 cards to my deck, but I added them almost all at once, so it was getting very tiring trying to get the easier cards to mature fast so I could study the other cards better. I was reviewing 100 cards a day, but that was becoming too much, basically too boring.

Dutch I really like learning Dutch. I'm having a lot of fun with it. I plan to write some short things in Dutch every once in awhile in order to activate what I'm learning. If anyone knows any current Dutch rock groups from Holland or Belgium, I would love to listen to some Dutch rock.

French My French is going well, I don't really know how much extensive reading is helping me though. I think intensive reading would help me a little more. I think for listening practice I really need TV shows with more colloquial speech and French subtitles so I can read what is being said and get used to the speed and learn any slang that I need too. I actually feel quite bad at my listening comprehension when watching clips of movies like La haine and L'esquive which have lots of slang and general fast talk that is normal in France.
L'esquive clip
Unfortunately, I can only understand bits and pieces of this clip. It really makes me sad. But L'esquive has always been one of the hardest challenges of listening comprehension for me. Even when I lived in France and used French on a daily basis and understood people with little problems, I had problems understand the conversations with the teens in the movie. Teens and children speaking was one of the last things I was able to understand for me for some reason, I wonder if anyone else experienced something similar with a language. Adults were always much easier to understand for me.

La haine clip
I seem to be able to understand this a bit better, but not really sure why.

I really need to improve my listening and speaking skills of real colloquial French with lots of slang, like how French friends talk to each other.

J'ai decidé à écrire quelque chose en français mais je ne suis pas sûr ce que j'écrirai encore. J'ai vraiment besion d'améliorer mes compétences avec le slang français, mais il est difficile d'améliorer dans ce coin sans vivir en France. Je me demande parfois même si c'est possible mais je dois essayer quand même. L'autre jour, je me suis souvenu une expression de slang que j'avais oublié, avoir la flemme. Cette expression était assez courant quand j'habitais en France et je l'ai encore oubliée. Quelquefois je sens encore nul en Français. :oops:


Spanish I feel a lot of improvements with my Spanish, now I just need to activate it. Also, I should review the conjugations for past tense and future tense, as I have forgotten them actively.
Decidí escribir un poqueño de español aquí. Ahora, utilizado los cursos de FSI y Duolingo para mejorar mi español. Pienso que aprendo mucho vocabulario pero necesito mejorar mi gramatica española. Támbien, Shakira es mi nueva profe de español ;) porque comenzo utilizar sus cancions viejas como Si te vas en Lyricstraining para aprendar más vocabulario y gramatica. Me gustá las cancions viejas de Shakira la más porque ellos tienen ue poco de un estillo rock y no pop. Escribí hoy varias frases españolas con un amigo mexicano y dijome que mi español es gracioso pero no entiendo por qué. :?: 8-)


Does that construction exist in Spanish, un poco de? I wasn't sure, because I was thinking in French where the construction for such a sentence is un peu de.
0 x
Spanish Duolingo: 42 / 100 Dutch Duolingo: 4 / 100
Feel free to help correct any of my languages, except my native tongue. :shock:

Arnaud
Blue Belt
Posts: 984
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 11:57 am
Location: Paris, France
Languages: Native: French
Intermediate: English, Russian, Italian
Tourist : Breton, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, German, Spanish, Latin
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=1524
x 2172

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby Arnaud » Fri Aug 14, 2015 5:29 am

deleted
Last edited by Arnaud on Tue Sep 13, 2016 5:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
0 x

User avatar
kimchizzle
Orange Belt
Posts: 124
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 12:05 am
Languages: English (N), French
Studying Spanish, Dutch, Russian
On the radar, Estonian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, Korean, Swedish
Language Log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.org/vi ... f=15&t=779
x 149

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby kimchizzle » Sun Aug 16, 2015 12:51 am

Studies are going well, not too much new to write about. After watching some Spanish TV shows, I was quite surprised to see how much native Spanish speakers use the diminitive suffixes, ito/ita. I was aware that it was common with animal names like, perrito, gatito, and proper names with close friends or family such as, Juanito, Anita, Jorgito, etc. But I realized native speakers used the diminutive with words I would never considered such as cosa/cosita, ahora/ahorita, momento/momenito.
0 x
Spanish Duolingo: 42 / 100 Dutch Duolingo: 4 / 100
Feel free to help correct any of my languages, except my native tongue. :shock:

User avatar
kimchizzle
Orange Belt
Posts: 124
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 12:05 am
Languages: English (N), French
Studying Spanish, Dutch, Russian
On the radar, Estonian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, Korean, Swedish
Language Log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.org/vi ... f=15&t=779
x 149

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby kimchizzle » Tue Aug 18, 2015 2:43 am

Spanish studies are going good. Been doing FSI everyday, duolingo and I recently found out about a wonderful website, Veinte Mundos. It is a wonderful resource for Spanish learners A2 and above. They have stories divided into intermediate and advanced topics, and each story has certain words or grammatical phrases underlined with a popup dictionary when the student scrolls over the word and the stories are able to be read by a native speaker. Also, if the main story is too difficult to understand at your level, they have all the stories written in a level appropriate for A2 learners, and words underlined they might have trouble with. There is also a way to create flashcards to study all the underlined words in the stories. It is really a great website and I recommend it to anyone learning Spanish.

A story I recently read was about was "La fiesta de Santa Águeda en Sergovia." It was very interesting and I learned a number of new words and expressions.

I wonder if there is a similar site for French.

I also burnt a CD for my car with old Shakira songs, before she became a popstar, and Ska-P songs. Haha, it is a bit of a difference of styles, but I've been using Lyricstraining to learn some of the Shakira songs and can sing along to parts of them, which I think will help just having Spanish in my head and being spoken or sung. Ska-P is also one of my favorite bands from Spain, and I can sing along to a few of their songs too.

My dutch studies are coming a long. Duolingo lessons are getting harder, and I often forget the spellings of new Dutch words. I need to find some other beginner resources besides Duo for Dutch. I do use Memrise as well, but I have a hard time staying dedicated to flash cards after a few weeks.

I would love to listen to more French news or podcasts during the day, but Spanish takes up the most of my study time currently.

Sadly, my Russian studies have lately been relegated to, "if I have time status" after studying my other languages first. I think I probably burnt out on Russian, so I'm basically just maintaining what little Russian I learned it seems.
0 x
Spanish Duolingo: 42 / 100 Dutch Duolingo: 4 / 100
Feel free to help correct any of my languages, except my native tongue. :shock:

User avatar
kimchizzle
Orange Belt
Posts: 124
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 12:05 am
Languages: English (N), French
Studying Spanish, Dutch, Russian
On the radar, Estonian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, Korean, Swedish
Language Log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.org/vi ... f=15&t=779
x 149

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby kimchizzle » Wed Aug 19, 2015 3:03 am

Escuchó a la cantora, Francisca Valenzuela? Hoy descubrí y escuché muchas sus canciones. Me les gustá muchas. Pienso que ella tiene un estillo de música un poco como Florence and the machine pero con las palabras españolas. Es extraño que yo parezco me gustar las canciones españolas de pop cuándo :D normalmente prefiero el rock. Tambien, aprendo hoy que Francisca Valenzuela nació en los Estados Unidos.

Además escuchar las canciones, hoy estudié mucho español con el FSI y el Duolingo y tambien leí un artículo de una festividad en Bolivia. El artículo estaba interesante. Estudié tambien el neerlandés pero mi neerlandés un nivel muy bajo. Estoy seguro que le va mejorar. :D
0 x
Spanish Duolingo: 42 / 100 Dutch Duolingo: 4 / 100
Feel free to help correct any of my languages, except my native tongue. :shock:

User avatar
kimchizzle
Orange Belt
Posts: 124
Joined: Wed Jul 22, 2015 12:05 am
Languages: English (N), French
Studying Spanish, Dutch, Russian
On the radar, Estonian, Ukrainian, Cantonese, Korean, Swedish
Language Log: http://how-to-learn-any-language.org/vi ... f=15&t=779
x 149

Re: Kimchizzle's Russian, French and Spanish journal

Postby kimchizzle » Wed Aug 19, 2015 9:09 pm

I'll use this time to write a quick blurb in my log of something I was thinking about. It seems to me there is some sort of link between how well a person can speak a foreign language and how well they understand it just by listening. Perhaps, it is only an imperfect link between the two, but a link none the less. I came up with this idea yesterday while I was watching some Mexican TV series and listening to some Spanish songs. I noticed I was able to hear more of the words without subtitles than before, because I was able to repeat more sentences back. Lately when I watch TV in a foreign language, I try to repeat back what the actors say without using subtitles or only L1 subtitles. Then I compare with the L2 subtitles and see how close I was. I think this is helpful for two reason, first it allows me to have more exposure to saying the L2 in a way that native speakers talk, second repeating sentences that you hear and double checking with the subtitles is good for improving listening comprehension along with speech. If a person can repeat back correctly what they hear it is a good test of their listening comprehension.

I found it interesting that I was able to repeat back more sentences without the subtitles than before because I haven't been studying listening comprehension very hard. Most of my Spanish studies has been FSI dialogs and drill and gradually gaining fluency of speech, along with Duolingo for grammar, reading and writing. So this is how I arrived at the conclusion that there is a link between speaking fluency and listening comprehension and that by improving your speaking skills in a foreign language a student can also indirectly improve their listening comprehension abilities as well.

I don't think this works the other way around though, improving listening comprehension doesn't necessarily affect speaking fluency. But I'm starting to think there is a shortcut to faster listening comprehension simply by improving one's speaking in a foreign language.

I was wondering if anyone has experienced this before in their own language studies, they were just working on improving their speaking and ended up improving their listening comprehension without actively trying to?
0 x
Spanish Duolingo: 42 / 100 Dutch Duolingo: 4 / 100
Feel free to help correct any of my languages, except my native tongue. :shock:


Return to “Language logs”

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 2 guests