TAC 2010 - Jayan (da, de)

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TAC 2010 - Jayan (da, de)

Postby Jayan » 2009-12-18, 3:17

<sarcasm>OK, 2010 is gonna be a real challenge.</sarcasm> 'Cause I don't have a whole lot of time on my hands, I'm starting out with just Danish and German. In 2011, I hope to add something more interesting, but that's next year.

STATUS

[flag]da[/flag]

I'm already fairly strong in written. My difficulty is definitely with spoken Danish. I can speak haltingly and make myself mostly understood, but understand Danish is another matter. If a native speaker speaks slowly and clearly (something which very few seem to be able to do :hmm: ), I am able to understand quite a bit. So, I've concluded that it's not so much my understanding of the vocabulary and grammar that needs to be worked on but just my general comfortableness in the language, though perhaps increased vocabulary comfort would contribute to the general comfort level.

My grammatical grasp on Danish is quite good (if I do say so myself :P ). I've gotten several compliments on my grammar from natives (Yaaaaaay! I'm good at something!!! :whoo: ). My main struggles are word order (I have the annoying tendency to americanize my word order :doh: ) and those annoying time expressions. A little study should iron those out.

My vocabulary is rather wimpy when it comes to real life. I have thus far learned mostly from books (a mistake when you're aiming for fluency :| ). As a result, my vocabulary is quite strong in the literary department, but being able to make smooth literary transitions doesn't help you when you are on Strøget shopping for shoes...or baking æbleskiver from your grandmother's recipe...or just about anything in life. I need to beef up the wordhoard with words from daily life.

[flag]de[/flag]

Just about zilch in the German department. I’ve started in on my book, so I know a bit like the alphabet, counting, introductions, and exchanging basic information about people. I love that German is so much easier than Danish to understand in spoken form. I think that, considering it shares Germanic roots, I’ll pick it up quickly.

GOALS

[flag]da[/flag]

I’d like to be solidly advanced in Danish by the end of the year. For me, this means getting to the point where I can almost effortlessly understand spoken Danish at almost normal speed. I also need to build my vocab and eliminate the last grammatical problems.

[flag]de[/flag]

My goal for German is to become solidly beginner. I’m new to the language, so I’m not quite sure what that means yet.

METHODS

[flag]da[/flag]

I seem to have exhausted every semi-decent Danish book available to me, and none of the websites I’ve found take you beyond the basics, so I’ve had to come up with my own tactic.
  • Brainstorm a list of topics (I’ve come up with about 40)
  • Collect a bunch of articles and/or podcasts and/or videos about said topics
  • Pore over said resources noting any vocabulary related to the topic I don’t know (I’m trying to not get too obsessive here. Fluency isn’t the goal…yet)
  • Practice these words in all possible ways:

[flag]de[/flag]

I inherited a copy of Deutsch: Na Klar!, which is probably not the best book for solo learning. I had planned to learn with a friend, but she backed out at the last minute, so I’m just gonna make do with Na Klar and supplement as needed. I’ll probably only be able to work on it occasionally (mostly Saturdays)
Last edited by Jayan on 2010-01-11, 1:02, edited 6 times in total.
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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby Æxylis » 2009-12-18, 8:36

Seems to me Danish is a pretty hard spoken language to understand, so have fun with that :lol:
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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby Trapy » 2009-12-18, 15:32

good luck!
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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby Jayan » 2009-12-23, 16:27

I thought about adding either a Finnic language (suomi or eesti) or Māori. I'm leaning towards Māori, but there's like no resources out there. Hashi, any suggestions? :)
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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby Riptide » 2009-12-23, 17:16

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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby Jayan » 2009-12-24, 1:31

Thanks, but I've decided to go for Estonian instead :) . I'm going to post my weekly updates in my UL blog, but I'll give my lesser tidbits and updates here.
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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby Yserenhart » 2009-12-27, 0:08

I found From Start to Finnish, but it's a djvu file not pdf. Don't know if that's any help to you.
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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby Stawrberry » 2009-12-27, 0:19

I can send you Teach Yourself Finnish, but I've heard it's not so good.

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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby Jayan » 2009-12-27, 22:22

Mini Progress Report (27/12/09)

not much to report, but I thought I would get in the habit of logging, since I'll have to do it for the next year (not the fun part of TAC for me)

[flag]de[/flag]

No progress since I originally made the thread. I'm going to try to get started before New Year's though.

[flag]fi[/flag]

I've dreamt about it so far, that's about it. :ohwell:

[flag]da[/flag]

Today I tackled vocabulary relating to the human body and describing appearances. That was fun :) I got about 90 new words to learn (no, I won't post a vocab list), which is good. If I keep up this pace of vocab acquisition, I should gain a few thousand words this year, which on top of my current vocabulary should place me somewhere on the fluency spectrum (granted near the lower end). At first, I was getting all medical terminology, which didn't seem particularly odd to me at first (my dad is a doctor, so our dinnertime conversation is filled with that stuff), but after I thought about it, I realised I still didn't know some basic terms ( :oops: like "toe"; turns out to be really easy: 'tå'), so I deleted words like coecum from my list and added words like knuckle. Note to self: only note vocabulary you really need at this point; coecum can come later if I so please. :doh:

I'm going to try to write a little something for the danes on Lang-8 to correct for me if I have time today; otherwise, I'll leave it to tomorrow.
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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby Jayan » 2009-12-31, 19:08

I just found this amazing site! :D It has a pretty damn comprehensive German grammar and a bunch of audio to boot! It's not organised very well as a course, but it's as a reference. 4 out of 5 stars.
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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan

Postby phaed » 2009-12-31, 20:04

Jayan wrote:I just found this amazing site! :D It has a pretty damn comprehensive German grammar and a bunch of audio to boot! It's not organised very well as a course, but it's as a reference. 4 out of 5 stars.
Ah, looks interesting, thank you! *adds to bookmarks* :D
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Re: TAC 2010 - Jayan (da, de)

Postby Jayan » 2010-01-11, 3:06

lørdag d. 9. januar:

I only studied Danish, but I did it for like 4 hours total.

I started off by browsing through http://dr.dk (despite criticism from many Danes, DR is my friend :) ). I watched news clips and a bit from X-Factor (basically to Danish version of American Idol ><, I didn't watch a full episode, because it's not that great singing). Then I found a show called Livvagterne (The Bodyguards). I watched the 03.01.2010 episode of that (I hate cliffhangers :evil: ) and greatly enjoyed it, despite the fact that I couldn't understand all of it. One perk of government funded TV is the absence of ads (I hate ads ><) :). After that, I browsed some more, reading the forums on DR, listening to the Nordjylland area specific weather and news channel, osv. As part of my more “official” course (i.e. the one I created to give my mom something to put down on my transcript :P), I wrote a description of my forelsket (I’m not quite sure how to translate that, it’s different from kæreste, in that the romantic feelings don’t have to be returned, but it would still technically be girlfriend…) and posted it on Lang-8 (http://lang-8.com/62543/journals/334718/En-beskrivelse for those interested).

søndag d. 10. januar:

I harvested some music videos from DR and converted them to mp3. Not all of it was Danish (ok, so less than half of it was…but still), but I learned about Celina Ree (I really like her stuff) and actually heard Nick og Jay for the first time. I found this one guy called Rasmus Seebach; I don’t really care for his musical style, but he sings in the clearest Danish I’ve ever heard (at first I thought it was Swedish, because it wasn’t as blurred as normal Danish :oops: ) which is great for someone like me who has trouble understanding full speed Danish.

I then had a 2½ hour conversation with a friend from Aalborg who I hadn’t talked with for a month. It’s in some ways preferable to talk with someone who isn’t quite as comfortable in Danish as he is, because then it’s harder to lapse into English, but it was still fun. I would probably call this the smoothest conversation in Danish that I’ve ever had. Definitely a good day :).

I intended to watch the second part of that Livvagterne episode but never got around to it.

To do list for next time (probably next Saturday):

Watch next Livvagterne episode (I wanna know what happens after the bombing :P )
Read up on Danish time expression in Comprehensive Grammar and take notes
Read a bit in Harry Potter og Dødsregalierne
Anything else I think of ;)

Thanks for reading (hope you did :?)
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