Canada (Canada)As some of you may have noticed I'm a new member to the Unilang community. I first joined at the beginning of 2014 but I only recently started posting, about a week ago. So for those who never saw my introduction(which was only in the russian-speaking part of the forum), my name is Remi(please refer to me as such), I'm a 21 year old Quebecer, who speaks french as a native language and english as a language I learned when I was 10. I discovered my love for learning languages years ago, but only recently did I realize how much I really loved it. And although learning languages like Arabic, Cantonese, Romanian or Italian would be much easier here in Quebec, the first foreign language I learned was Russian. And I totally fell in love with it. My 2015 TAC challenge will include 3 languages, Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian, with each level of proficiecy described underneath each one of them.
So here they are, in order of how much effort is to be spent on it :
[flag=]ru[/flag] RUSSIAN / РУССКИЙ
Current level : Between B1 and B2, but I'd say closer to B2.
Goal : C1
The reason for why I learn russian would take a wall of text to explain, so I'll resume it by saying that when I start studying the culture of a country, it feels necessary for me to understand its language as well. There aren't many russian speakers in Quebec, although they are more common in one region of Montreal, I live on the south shore(The city of montreal being an island) so russian-speakers aren't a common sight. I got to the B1 level with a lot of practice, I did all 90 of pimsleur's russian lessons, listen to a lot of russian music, television, and now unilang. It's working well so far, after two years I didn't think it could be possible for me to get to that level in a language I pretty much can't practice in real life, a language that has totally different grammar and roots. I'm going to be travelling to Russia in 2016 and I want to be as proficient as possible. C1 is in my opinion achievable, as I'm between B1 and B2 at the moment and have been making a lot of progress recently. This is the language that I'll be focusing on the most.
[flag=]es[/flag]SPANISH / ESPAÑOL
Current level : A1
Goal : B1
Although my spanish is still very basic, it feels really easy for me to have conversations with native speakers; in fact, they are often surprised that I'm only at that level because I can speak at a good speed and my accent isn't so bad (it does sound a bit Russian though.. and sometimes I mix up words in Russian and Spanish!
) I will be starting all of Pimsleur's lessons, will be using Unilang and I may listen to some spanish TV and music as well. The big advantage I have here for this language is that there's a huge community of spanish speakers where I live, and I have many spanish speaking customers at my job who are eager to hear anyone speak spanish with them! So the learning process will obviously(don't forget I'm a french speaker) be much easier than Russian. For that reason I think B1 is a reasonable level to aim for in one year and I'm looking forward to see you guys on the spanish speaking forum quite soon! I might wait a bit to gain some skill before I start chatting about more complicated stuff though.[flag=]uk[/flag]UKRAINIAN / УКРАЇНЬСКА
Current level : what mutual intellegibility with Russian gives me
Goal : A2
This is a very uncommon and as some would even say, somewhat pointless language to learn where I live. I do not think the same. Although most Canadian Ukrainians aren't concentrated in my region, there's an ever-increasing number of Ukrainian speakers in Canada. This number isn't huge, but it's there. For a long time I've been thinking I should focus on German or Swedish before learning Ukrainian since it's got much more chances to be useful to me, but I can't keep myself from being fascinated every time I read it or hear it. So there it is. I'm pretty good at learning a language just by listening, so this will be a test. I won't be putting a lot of effort in it, I might do a few Pimsleur lessons just to get the main point of the accent, but I want to try out the skills I developped in Russian and the skills I naturally have to learn a language just by listening, on Ukrainian. I'll be posting very simple things in the Ukrainian Unilang forum, will watch TV and listen to music in Ukrainian. In my opinion A1 is easily achievable but I would really like to get to A2. Ukraine is also a place I would like to visit, just for that reason I think learning its language is far from useless.
Please, everyone, all feedback and or questions are more than welcomed! In fact, I'm eager to see what you have to say! Thank you for reading my 2015 TAC challenge and I wish you, fellow participants, a good learning!
United States (United States)
Italy (Italia)
Ukraine (Україна)