læŋgwədʒ

Hello all,

While I haven’t posted since the beginning of February, I still have been maintaining my language studies.  Although it feels a bit like cheating, my language practice has been almost 100% listening throughout March for both of my language.  Heavy emphasis has been on radio broadcasts that I am able to listen to while working.  If anyone is interested, I’ve been finding broadcasts through ListenLive.eu.  The site provides plenty of links to music, news, weather, and other types of broadcasts from numerous cities throughout Europe.  For my German in particular, it has been a great resource as I have enjoyed hearing some of the different accents throughout Germany and other German-speaking countries.  Of course, the Swiss “accent” was most interesting to hear but did require a bit more attention and thus was not the best to listen to casually while working.

As for future plans, I keep saying that I want to do something besides listening.  One way of doing that is to try some extensive reading.  I don’t have a *lot* of books or magazines to read in either of my L2s, but that’s what the internet is for, right?  I stumbled on the idea of extensive reading (again) by catching up on some posts from Bakunin learns Thai (an worthwhile read when you have the time).  He was invited to take part in an extensive reading challenge called the Tadoku contest.  While I do not plan to join the contest, I don’t think it would hurt to add some more reading into my schedule.

While I am not going to promise an exact number, the plan for this month is to devote my usual 20 minutes of at least one of my two languages per day to reading for pleasure.  I won’t put any limits on the content as long as it is in the target language (German or Spanish).  Today, I started out with some basic wiki articles about very commonplace things that I am already familiar with.  For example, I read through the German articles on ketchup and hamburgers.  Of course, I already know plenty about both topics, but I’ve never really learned about them nor discussed them in German.  It was a good refresher on some basic vocabulary that I haven’t used in ages (such as Ursprung), and I easily understood some cognates that I’d never officially learned  (such as Sellerie and Cayennepfeffer).

Well, that’s all I have time for now.  Until…whenever the next time is!

Sir Ryan

P.S.  If anybody hassles me enough, I can go through my logs for February and March to see how much time I put in.

P.P.S.  If Eva is still alive/around, I would imagine that somebody or another might appreciate an update from her.  From what I hear, she’s been playing with Sanskirt of late.

Greetings once again and Happy Chinese New Year!

It’s been a while since either of us have stopped in, but I will assure any potential readers that I’m still alive and definitely sticking to my schedule of a minimum of 20 minutes per day per language.  I won’t have too much time to get into each and every day in this post but would nevertheless like to make a few updates.

Let’s start with Spanish.  As time has gone on (since my last post anyway), I’ve found that I’ve had less and less time to read.  My focus has been primarily on listening over the last couple of weeks, but I’ve tried to change things up a bit.  I’ve been looking around YouTube for Spanish-language television programs and also have been listening to various Spanish-language radio broadcasts (both through the internet and on the local radio).  These activities have made up for the bulk of the hours in Spanish.  As for reading, I did get in a few minutes here and there.  I ended up finishing La vuelta del mundo en 80 días, which was a great motivation booster.  Then, I pulled out my translation of El león, la bruja y el ropero and have been reading it off and on.  I never saw the film(s) nor read the original book in English, so we’ll see how much I actually understood once I finish it.

I guess it’s time to do an overview of my German now.  Even more than with Spanish, my German studies have been almost 100% listening-oriented.  I’ve gotten in a few minutes of reading the news, but it’s become a bit of a habit to watch an episode or two of NCIS dubbed into German while eating my dinner.  The Germans do an excellent job of dubbing lots of shows and movies, and this NCIS series is no exception.  They even try quite hard to match the voices of their English-speaking counterparts, which is nice.  I did get in a few minutes of reading, but that tended to simply supplement my listening.  The tiny bit of reading I did tended to be just news articles and a few wiki pages (if the English articles weren’t as detailed).

What’s the plan for February?  Well, I have a few ideas, but we’ll see how they work out.  Firstly, I’d like to shift to do even just a little bit more reading.  I’m not so worried about output at this point, so reading and listening are fine for what little time I do have.  I do have several books in my target languages, so that’s not a problem.  Of course, there are also countless pages of German and Spanish materials available online too that I could take a peak at.

If I can make the effort (and stop being so cheap), I’d like to also invest in a radio tuner device so that I can more easily listen to audio materials in my car.  I’ve seen a number of such items on eBay that allow one to broadcast over certain radio frequencies whatever you’ve plugged the device into (iPod or other mp3 players).  With such a device, I could more easily broadcast some German and Spanish audio texts that I’ve downloaded from LingQ.com and other sites.  They’re less than 10USD on eBay and would be worthwhile, right?  Have any readers actually used them?

Finally, before finishing this up, I wanted to do one final thing.  In case anyone is interested, I wanted to take a look at the “raw data” a bit.  In theory, if I were to have studied the minimum of 20 minutes per day, I would have gotten in 620 minutes (10 hours 20 minutes) per language in January.  After crunching some numbers, this is what I ended up with.  In German, I ended up reaching 795 minutes in January, which only equals 13 hours 15 minutes.  The bulk of that was listening though.  As for Spanish, the total came to 777 minutes.  For those too lazy to do the math (like myself under most circumstances), that comes to 12 hours 57 minutes.  I’m a bit surprised to say that I did more German work than Spanish as I had expected it to be the other way, but in both instances I made it well beyond the minimum 620 minutes that I had been shooting for.  Between both languages, I actually ended up with 1572 minutes or 26 hours and 12 minutes.  Compared to my previous record last year of a few minutes (per month!), I think this experiment is going quite well.

Well, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, feel free to leave some comments.  Otherwise, I’ll catch you all next time!

Sir Ryan

P.S.  Language buddy, Eva, are you still out there somewhere?

Good evening,

It’s about time I tried to catch up on all of my language updates.  I have been keeping up with my minimum of twenty minutes per language per day, but the posting has definitely been lagging.   Sorry!  I won’t bore everyone with a super detailed account of the exact minutes (this time =P), but I’ll provide an overview and a few links.

For German, I’ve continued to watch several episodes of NCIS on YouTube.  As I already know the plot (and many of the common expressions and sayings of the characters), I’ve found this form of practice to be most beneficial as I’ve been able to focus more on the language than anything else.  Of course, there are times that I just sit back and watch the episode, but there is always passive learning too, right? In the event that anyone is interested, I’m in the middle of an episode called “Die Unsterblichen”.  You can start watching it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_3C2XwoxdU

Also, I finally had an opportunity practise “speaking” German a little bit.  A friend I met in Berlin hit me up on Y!M, and we were able to chat for 15-20 minutes.  It was nice to catch up but actually use German in a real situation.  When I actually have to produce something, I’m forced to recognise how much more there is to learn.  Sometimes, it’s frustrating.  In this particular instance, it was a good motivator.

Finally, last night, I was running out of time to “study”, so I decided to turn on some German music that others have shared with me (while finishing up some other work).  Again, this was a bit passive, but, as a I told my co-author earlier, it’s *something*, which is a huge improvement for me.  Here are a few of the songs that people have shared with me (and that I’m now looking up on YouTube):

Juli – November: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFWE90eiKVg

Juli – Warum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ELqtyyv5zg

Unheilig – Geboren um zu leben: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-L3wj_HaMQ

etc.

Now, as for Spanish, there have been two main sources of input.  I can’t quite recall if I mentioned it before, but I’ve just about finished the book La vuelta del mundo en 80 días.  The text hasn’t gotten any more difficult, but I’ve been taking it slowly and trying to figure out any unknown words through context clues.  It’s been a good experience, and I recommend reading such childhood favourites in translation to those who wish to start learning again.

As with the German, I’ve also been doing a bit of passive listening (in the car during my daily commute).  It’s mostly been a mix of radio advertisements and Spanish-language music of all varieties.  I was able to remember the lyrics to one song and looked it up as soon as I got in the door.  I figured that somebody out there might want a record of what I’ve been listening to, right?  Right?  *Cricket sound*  Anyway, if anyone is interested, here’s a YouTube link to the song: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXYFhhu00sM

FINALLY, in response to Eva’s previous post, I wanted to share a link for a Sanskrit correspondence course.  Besides postage, the (government-approved) school in India that hosts the program only charges 20USD per year, and the program lasts for two years.  So, overall, it’s not a bad investment.  Anyway, here’s the last link of the post: http://www.sanskrit.nic.in/main/distance_education.htm

Enjoy the links, everyone!  I’ll see you on the flip side!

“Sir Ryan”

Guten Morgen!

Every two days, it seems that I’m updating.  I’d like to post daily, but things have been crazy at work.  Despite all of that, I’m still maintaining my language practice.

Today, we’ll start with German (again, I think?).  On Thursday (06.01.2011), I was able to get in 21 minutes of Deutsche Welle Nachrichten podcasts again during my commute.  I really enjoy having these to break up the week.  It’s not that I don’t like listening to the stories from LingQ.com, but I tend to listen to the same ones over and over in order to pick up some vocabulary simply through repetition.  On Friday (07.01.2011), I skipped the usual listening practice and watched a full episode of NCIS dubbed into German.  It’s been a while since I’ve watched anything like that, and the language was a bit above my level.  Nevertheless, I got in a solid 42 minutes of listening practice and was able to follow along decently well by watching the action in addition to listening.  I’m a bit curious to see what other shows (whether German or American) that I can find in German on YouTube.  Sometimes, I suspect it’s just a matter of finding the right keywords to search!

Now, we’re on to Spanish!  On Thursday (06.01.2011), I did some of my usual podcast listening.  I listened to some recorded conversations by “Berta y Òscar” from Spain, who discuss all sorts of things about life there.  I listened to two but only really remember the first.  Berta and Òscar were discussing meet-ups they had with Steve Kaufmann, the founder of LingQ.com.  The details weren’t *super* fascinating, but it was still good to hear the full conversation about such an everyday topic completely in Spanish.  As for yesterday (07.01.2011), I took a break from the podcasts and MP3s and spent 22 minutes reading La vuelta del munda en 80 días, an adapted translation of Around the World in 80 Days.  I didn’t realise when I got the book that it was an adaptation, but that’s quite alright with me.  As I transition back into using Spanish (even for a few minutes per day), it’s good to keep things simple.

As this project/resolution (of practising my languages) continues, I’d like to slowly transition to more reading (and possibly writing).  I have a small collection of books in Spanish and German but could certainly use more resources.  Of course, there are tons of materials to read online, but I spend far too much time as it is staring at a screen.  If I could have a physical book to take with me (instead of needing a computer), that’d be great.  So, if anyone out there has recommendations for (inexpensive?) sources of literature in Spanish or German, please let me know.  Naturally, I wouldn’t turn down specific recommendations either.  If there is a particular book you think I ought to read, let me know!

Finally, I’d love to get some speaking practice in.  Speaking is probably one of my weakest areas.  When I read or write, I can always look up words in a dictionary, but that’s obviously not an option when speaking.  Yet, it’s rather difficult to schedule a lot of speaking practice at this point in time, but that’s a possible goal as well for the future.  I’ve met several people through SharedTalk.com, with whom I could speak, but they oftentimes living abroad.  Scheduling a conversation with somebody, who lives on another continent is always a challenge, but this is something else I need to consider for the future.

After the winter/Christmas holidays, it’s hard to get back to work, and finding time to do language studies is already becoming more difficult.  Nevertheless, I did manage to slip in at least twenty minutes per language per day.  This’ll be a super brief update just to keep track of what I’ve been doing.

We’ll start with the Spanish.  Two days ago (4.01.2011), I was able to get in only about five minutes of reading.  I work at a school and was stumbled upon some children’s books in Spanish.  Of course, they were (grammatically) super easy, but, as a language (ie. non-native), there were still plenty of words for me to learn (or re-learn/refresh).  Such simple things as harina were in the text, and I hadn’t seen or used these in ages.  If I can sneak back into the classroom in question, I’ll see if I can find the title of the work in case anyone is interested in using it to teach their Spanish-speaking children how to read. =P  As for yesterday (05.01.2011), I turned on a radio broadcast from Spain (online) for over 45 minutes and was listening intently at some points and rather passively more often than not.  Nevertheless, I gave it a shot (and actually remembered to do so!).

As for German, my practice has consistently been focused on listening (as that’s what I have the most time to do).  During my commute, I usually listen to some podcasts or MP3s (mostly from LingQ.com).  For a change of pace, I spent my German practice time on Tuesday (04.01.2011) listening to some Deutsche Welle Nachrichte (news) podcasts for 21 minutes.  Then, yesterday (05.01.2011), I returned back to the Wölfe in Deutschland MP3 series for another 27 minutes.  As I remarked before, there is tons of vocabulary that I already know, but listening to the series over and over has taught me to slowly figure out some of the few words I do not, simply by looking at the context.  If/when I have more time, I can try to start taking note of the words I’m picking up and mention them.

Bis morgen!