I’ve moved this endeavor to a subdomain at my Language Geek website. The relocated language learning journal can be found at http://journal.languagegeek.net/. The new feed is here, if you would like to subscribe.
Thanks for reading!
I’ve moved this endeavor to a subdomain at my Language Geek website. The relocated language learning journal can be found at http://journal.languagegeek.net/. The new feed is here, if you would like to subscribe.
Thanks for reading!
Dutch
I reviewed Assimil Dutch with Ease, lessons 8-10, and did a first pass over lesson 11.
Arabic
I went back in my Arabic alphabet book and reviewed baa, taa, thaa, and nuun, just to make sure they didn’t slip from my memory. I also tried to download an Arabic script deck in Anki, but it’s not displaying right. I assume it’s because I’ll need to install custom Arabic fonts on my computer (Windows XP). If anyone has any experience with this, please let me know in the comments.
I also received a copy of Hans Wehr’s Arabic-English Dictionary via OhioLINK at the university, and was surprised to find that short vowels aren’t marked in it. A transliteration for every word is provided, so you can work out the vowels that way, but I figured short vowels would be written in, considering it is, as far as I can tell, geared towards learners of Arabic.
German
I added some more cards to Anki, as well as reviewed all of the cards that were due. I also listened to a few episodes of ZeitZeichen, a wonderful daily podcast for those who love history.
Russian
All I did was Anki cards, as I’m still playing catch up; I had a Russian deck with around 500 cards that I let sit for quite a while, so I had a very large backlog of cards to get through. I’m down to around 30 now.
German
I added about 30 new sentence item cards to my German Anki deck; I’m still working on “repairing” my vocabulary. The fact that German was my first foreign language certainly shows; I’ve got holes in it all over the place.
Russian
I added lesson 43 to my Russian Anki deck, generally sticking to one sentence per card. I also reviewed around 120 Russian cards. Ideally, I want to have the whole book in Anki for review; I have lessons 1-15 in my deck already, but I’ll need to go back and add the lessons in between.
French
I went through 4 sets of exercises on the present tense of regular verbs in The Ultimate French Review and Practice book. I’m fine with recognizing conjugations, through New French with Ease, but my ability to produce said conjugations quickly is not where I want it to be. Hopefully by working through exercises like this, my speed will improve. I also like the UFRP because it covers a lot of basic vocabulary that wasn’t present in New French with Ease.
On the agenda
Things that need some attention soon: some more Arabic letters, a review of my most recent Dutch lessons, and a review of my most recent Spanish lessons.
I didn’t do much today other than various mother’s day things.
I did add around 50 sentence items to my German Anki deck, though, and reviewed all of my outstanding cards (around 30). Back to the books tomorrow!
Happy mother’s day!
Dutch
In Assimil’s Dutch with Ease, I reviewed lesson 8, and went ahead and did lessons 9 and 10. I’m going to have to be careful as I go forward with Dutch, due to the great similarities to German. A lot of the words look and sound fairly similar, but have different spellings: Stadt, staat; neugierig, nieuwsgierig;mein, nijn, etc.
I’m thinking I may end up using Professor Arguelles’ scriptorium exercise to help me nail down Dutch spelling.
French
I’ve been neglecting French, so I pulled out Assimil’s Using French, which I’ve not yet worked through. I did lessons 9 and 10; I’ve done them in the past, but it’s been a while. I see a recurring theme here…
I also did some French cards in Anki (~40).
German
Just Anki for today, coming to around 30 cards reviewed.
Russian
In Russian without Toil, I reviewed lesson 43 and did lesson 44. 44 introduces the months of the year, which are strikingly similar to their English counterparts:
Январь
Февраль
Март
Апрель
Май
Июнь
Июль
Август
Сентябрь
Октябрь
Ноябрь
Декабрь
German
I read a few more pages in King’s Schwarz, and got up to speed on my German sentence deck in Anki (about 100 cards reviewed).
Arabic
I did a first pass over the letters ‘alif, hamza, waaw, daal and dhaal. Hamza in particularly is pretty odd to me, as it is actually a glottal stop, but counts as a full letter. It’s important because in Arabic, no word can begin with a vowel; if a word sounds like it begins with a vowel, it’s actually beginning with a glottal stop (hamza) followed by the vowel. Hamza and ‘alif have a close relationship, because if there is a hamza at the beginning of a word, it “rides” on an ‘alif, rather than standing alone. Pretty interesting stuff.
Russian
I reviewed lesson 43 in Russian without Toil again. When doing New French with Ease, I didn’t review lessons in the book nearly as much, but Russian vocabulary has a knack for not sticking to my memory. I started to do lesson 44, but got distracted by something or other, and never got back to it. It’s on the agenda for tomorrow.
All in all, not a whole lot done today, but most of my evening was taken up by going to the movies with some friends, so I suppose I’ll be content with what progress was made.
Russian
I reviewed lesson 41 of Russian without Toil, then went ahead and did a first pass over lessons 42 and 43. 43 introduces, among other things, the days of the week:
понедельник – Monday
вторник – Tuesday
среда – Wednesday
четверг – Thursday
пятница – Friday
суббота – Saturday
воскресенье – Sunday
I liked how some of these have very clear roots: вторник -> второй (second, adjective), среда -> середина (middle), четверг -> четвёртый (fourth, adjective), пятница -> пять (five).
I also did the “repetition round” for 70 Russian words I first started learning a few days ago, using Iversen’s word list method. In doing so, I’ve come to the conclusion that until I figure out a way to mark stress changes clearly without having to write out the whole word, the word list method just isn’t going to work for Russian verbs. Writing out the infinitive, first person singular, and second person singular to indicate stress pattern simply takes up too much space, not to mention too many brain cycles; I can work through a list of Russian adjectives or nouns fairly quickly, but the verbs with all of their permutations slow me down a lot.
Dutch
I reviewed lessons 6 and 7 in Assimil’s Dutch with Ease, and did a first pass over lesson 8. This is technically all review, as I started this course before and, along with Spanish, let it slide. But it’s been long enough that lesson 8 had some things in it I had forgotten.
I continue to be somewhat amused by the Dutch to German / English correlations. Dutch looks and sounds like someone mashed together equal parts of English, German, and funny; I say funny because at times, it sounds like someone speaking English with a funny accent (to me anyway). “Dat” for “that,” for example.
German
I took Stephen King’s Schwarz (book 1 of the Dark Tower series) to bed, and read about 7 pages before crashing for the night. I didn’t take a dictionary with me, so didn’t look anything up, but didn’t have any trouble following the story.
Arabic
I did a very quick look over the letters I’ve learned so far, so as to not let them vanish from memory, but other than that, I didn’t get in anything. I hope to get two or three new letters under my belt tomorrow.