TAC 2010 - yersi (pt, es, it, fr, jp, ko)

[Bizet]

Gracias. Mi español todavía no es igual de bueno que mi portugués, pero creo que se va a mejorar.

Claro que va a mejorar con la práctica.

[Karavinka]

너의 선생님 아니에요. 학생 이에요, 너의 동창생 이에요!

하하, 좋아지만 난 초심자만 이에요. 오 - 그리고 난 보인 음악을 넌 좋아해요?

This is me sinking down into the polite speech level just because you are.

Btw please, for the sake of your own language skills don't rely on any of my sentences being grammatically correct. I'm as much of a novice as you are!

동창생 is someone who graduated from same educational institution (anywhere from Kindergarten to University) and it is akin to "alumni." And two misspellings on your lists: 선생님 and 태권도.

[yersi]

Darkina: My goals for this TAC is intermediate passive understanding in the six languages I study - It says so right there in the OP. As for pro instruction vs. self-study, I don’t have time to write a lot of words about this so how about this instead; come back to this thread in six months and we’ll see who’s right, okay?

Bizet: Gracias por las correciónes grammaticas. Tengo una pregunta para Usted: ¿quien es el hombre de la pintura? Penso que es un hombre mucho famoso..

Progress update:

The internet at my mother’s place (where I was staying for Christmas) went down yesterday so I couldn’t post the write-up I had prepared. Not that it was very interesting, it consisted of another table of numbers from 11-20 and a list of the additional 72 words I memorized.

Today however was a very interesting day: A friend of my sister’s who works in Brazil and speaks fluent Portuguese was over at our place and she complimented my Portuguese a lot – According to her I’m further along than most gringos who’ve lived in Brazil for several years.

Inspired by this I chose to focus on Portuguese today, memorizing 85 words I had noted down from before and some additional ones that my sister’s friend mentioned to me during our conversation.

[Bizet]

Bizet: Gracias por las correcciones gramaticales. Tengo una pregunta para Usted: ¿quién es el hombre de la pintura? Pienso que es un hombre muy famoso..

No hay de qué.

El hombre de la pintura es Georges Bizet, un famoso compositor francés de óperas de la época del Romanticismo, cuya obra más conocida es Carmen. Mi nombre de usuario es su apellido.

[Meera]

Your list of lanaguges is so impressive Good Luck

[モモンガ]

Boa sorte!

Obrigado!

Can I be nosy and ask what this method is? I'm always looking for new ways to learn vocabulary because my repertoire of words in Korean is pretty abysmal to say the least.

It's hard to explain and I'm not entirely sure anybody else could use it effectively. During my first semester of Chinese I was doing very poorly and desperately needed a good way to cram vocabulary for an upcoming exam. I eventually resorted to printing out vocabulary lists containing only the Norwegian definitions of the words I was trying to learn, and then filling in the corresponding words in the target language (Chinese) over and over again until I hit the upper percentiles of successful recalls. Of course, this was grossly inefficient time-wise but the words stuck and I went from being pretty much a D-student to getting straight As in all my Chinese classes afterward. I've since refined it and made it more efficient by cutting out a lot of the repetition.

What I'm doing is basically incorporating the words I want to learn into a sort of vocabulary test, gradually writing a list of Norwegian definitions by hand, line-by-line, saying the word in the target language out loud and then repeating the preceding five words. I divide the list into blocks of five, and repeat two blocks at a time when one block is finished. Once I hit the end of a page, I repeat every word on that page. I do all this without looking at the definitions in the target language once they are on the list. Once I have about 40-50 words I test myself to see which words I was able to recall. If I make a spelling mistake or find myself unable to recall certain words, I write these down and include them in the next vocabulary test.

It's not rocket science; tons of repetition does make stuff stick. I have no idea if it would work for anyone else.

Progress Report:
Today I chose to focus on Spanish and memorized a list of words I had noted down reading some forum posts and Youtube comments. Stand-outs include "mierda" and "cagar" which I'm sure will be plenty useful in the future.

I also made and memorized a chart of ten animal names in all six languages. I've included it below, please tell me if you see something that's obviously wrong. I didn't manage to find a conclusive definition for "rabbit" in Korean, does anyone know one?

Hmmm, the Korean one is a little wrong, pig is just 돼지 or 도야지.

[モモンガ]

Progress Report:

Memorized another table of 60 nouns, for this one I chose to focus on classroom-related vocabulary. Again, point out any obvious mistakes if you can see them. I didn't find out what "pencil case" was in Korean, could anyone (etoile, Karavinka?) help me there?

The rest of the vocabulary was a grab bag of random vocab noted down from wine bottles, forums and IM conversations. I spiced things up a little by memorizing around 20 complete phrases in Spanish and Portuguese in addition to about 30 single words spread across different languages. Right now I'm managing about 90-100 words a day, which is still far from target.

My biggest stumbling block is the Korean - Obvious Chinese (계산기) or English (볼펜) loanwords are manageable but other words slide away magically like peas on a teflon slope. It's awful, and reminds me of the drudgery of learning Chinese vocabulary back when I first started out.

Well, my head is floating with 20-odd words I used the method with last night. About 80% have stuck overnight... which is a huge improvement on struggling to remember two or three. [...] 선생님, 감사합니다.

별말씀을요.

The UVAM™ does work man. I read your post months ago and still can remember 几可乱真 off the top of my head. You should really try to get the big bucks out of it.

I think it's too hardcore to have any appeal beyond language nerds. Though, I'm of course open to any suggestions about how to monetize it.

Some corrections on the Italian: cat is "il gatto," and gallina means specifically "hen," as in a female chicken, if you just want the word "chicken" in general, use "il pollo."

Grazie! Like Renacido said, "høne" means "hen" in Norwegian but it's nice to know the different definitions.

책상 = desk.

[yersi]

Update time!

I was at our family's hut for the last two days with no internet access so this is the update for Monday, Tuesday and today.

[flag]br-pt[/flag] Portuguese
I've definitely gotten bitten by the Portuguese bug this week, I've been focusing exclusively on it for a few days now. Part of this is because I've been exchanging messages with a nice Portuguese girl and found that I needed to sharpen my grammar a lot.

In addition to memorizing about 100 words over the last three days I've memorized about 30 phrases mined from emails and IM conversations and the conjugation table for the verb "fazer". I'm going to do this for some common verbs like "ser", "ter" and "estar" and some sample regular verbs with "-ar", "-er" and "-ir"-endings.

Phrase memorizing seems to work better than straight vocabulary. Part of it is that phrases are usually immediately useful and it's easier to get motivated for them, another thing is that you pick up grammatical information subconsciously. If this approach seems to give better results I'll try doing the same for French, Italian and Spanish.

[hashi]

If you're interested, Danial and I are going to start a skype chat for Japanese learnings. Should you want to join in, feel free to add me to skype, the username is in my signature.

[hashi]

If you're interested, Danial and I are going to start a skype chat for Japanese learnings. Should you want to join in, feel free to add me to skype, the username is in my signature.