TAC 2015 - Ciarán12 - Japanese/Irish

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Re: TAC 2015 - Ciarán12 - Irish

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-01-20, 8:19

dEhiN wrote:
Let me know if I can do anything to help you. (Oh, by the way, quite a bit of Swabian can be heard in Berlin, too - much to the dismay of the natives. ;) )

What's Swabian?

A dialect of German.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swabian_German

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Re: TAC 2015 - Ciarán12 - Irish

Postby kevin » 2015-01-20, 9:18

dEhiN wrote:Or you could just do one language - ie, Irish!

That wouldn't feel complete enough. ;)

What's Swabian?

My native dialect, in which Ciarán has been interested before.

Ciarán12

Re: TAC 2015 - Ciarán12 - Irish

Postby Ciarán12 » 2015-01-21, 22:01

kevin wrote:Yes, it would be ridiculous to say that I'm anywhere near that level now. Even though... well, you know what I was going to say. :D


Don't even...! :nope:

kevin wrote:
Everyone says that Irish can't be learned. Who knows, they might be right. ;)


"...nó go bhfaighe mé bás san iarracht!" - Fear Mór na Gaeilge (Ciarán)

kevin wrote:And yes, Dutch is different because guessing gives me a relatively large passive vocabulary. This is probably the only reason why just reading a lot worked so well. So yes, I can't remember being at that intermediate level for any language, so all my reasoning is invalid. I still think that I prefer reading to course books - I mean, even for Irish, I don't have a course book, but just one or two (supposedly) easy books to read.


I think it's just that with out a strict course to follow I'm prone to just, well, not doing anything much. It's a way to impose a kind of regime on myself, not much more than that really.

kevin wrote:
I'll print you an exclusive first edition signed by me :lol:

Yay! :lol:

I don't dare to ask about the estimated delivery date, but be sure that I won't forget about your promise!


:lol: Well, certainly there won't be any problem sending you the file when I've got a few lessons done. I've already got all the material for the first lesson, I just need my tutor to look over it and make sure my translation of the dialogue wasn't awful.

kevin wrote:
I definitely think you should :wink: .

I would have to decide on the languages to put in a TAC thread. Maybe better not.


From what I've seen, a lot of people switch languages, add or take away language in the course of their TACs, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. Well, I mean, worry about it a little bit, I think that's the whole point (i.e. it's something which gives you a reason to stick to something and not flake out), but worrying so much about it that you don't do it is even less helpful than not worrying enough, so...

kevin wrote:Let me know if I can do anything to help you. (Oh, by the way, quite a bit of Swabian can be heard in Berlin, too - much to the dismay of the natives. ;) )


Ich weiss nicht wass kan ich tun es zu verbessern. Ich glaube dass ich mein Deutscher Thread wieder lesen sollte.

Ciarán12

Re: TAC 2015 - Ciarán12 - Irish

Postby Ciarán12 » 2015-01-21, 22:06

kevin wrote:
What's Swabian?

My native dialect, in which Ciarán has been interested before.


Und das bin ich immer noch!

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Re: TAC 2015 - Ciarán12 - Irish

Postby linguoboy » 2015-01-21, 22:17

Ciarán12 wrote:Ich weiss nicht, wass kan ich tun kann, um es zu verbessern. Ich glaube, dass ich meinen Deutsch-Thread wieder lesen sollte.
"Richmond is a real scholar; Owen just learns languages because he can't bear not to know what other people are saying."--Margaret Lattimore on her two sons

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Re: TAC 2015 - Ciarán12 - Irish

Postby kevin » 2015-01-22, 0:23

Ciarán12 wrote:I think it's just that with out a strict course to follow I'm prone to just, well, not doing anything much. It's a way to impose a kind of regime on myself, not much more than that really.

Now that could be an explanation why I make only little progress with my languages... ;)

:lol: Well, certainly there won't be any problem sending you the file when I've got a few lessons done. I've already got all the material for the first lesson, I just need my tutor to look over it and make sure my translation of the dialogue wasn't awful.

Don't forget the part with exclusive first edition signed by yourself. That's the important one. :lol:

From what I've seen, a lot of people switch languages, add or take away language in the course of their TACs, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. Well, I mean, worry about it a little bit, I think that's the whole point (i.e. it's something which gives you a reason to stick to something and not flake out), but worrying so much about it that you don't do it is even less helpful than not worrying enough, so...

I suspect anyway that my thread would end up like yours last year...

Ich weiss nicht wass kan ich tun es zu verbessern. Ich glaube dass ich mein Deutscher Thread wieder lesen sollte.

Ja, vielleicht. Du weißt selbst, wie du am besten lernst.

My help is just an offer. If you don't have a use for it, that's fine.

Ciarán12 wrote:Und das bin ich immer noch!

(swg) Nô isch rächt! :)
(de) Dann ist es recht. :)

Sometimes I still think I should put something together to make it actually possible to get some information. Though that would probably mean that I could do a TAC on trying to understand how Swabian grammar actually works...

Ciarán12

Re: TAC 2015 - Ciarán12 - Irish

Postby Ciarán12 » 2015-02-24, 0:31

UPDATE:

So, as expected, all plans have more or less completely failed. As I said, this was expected, so I'm not too disheartened by it :)

The major change is that I now need to focus mainly on Japanese, but I'm carrying on with Irish in the background.

Japanese:

Kanji: Revise the Kanji by going through Remembering the Kanji again with Memrise there to help keep me on track with revision.

Vocab: Memrise to some extent perhaps, but honestly, I will be reading so much Japanese that I'm pretty confident I will simply reacquire the necessary vocab again quickly enough. I will make lists of anything I have trouble with and drill those.

Grammar: I'm a little rusty, but not nearly as much as I thought. I'm going through a reasonable comprehensive grammar book and there is not much in there that I need to brush up on. I will treat any new grammar pattern just as with vocab - make a list, drill it.

Conversation: Not as essential at the moment, but I would like to get back into speaking it, so I've decided to start regularly attending a weekly Japanese language meet up here again.

Listening: This is the area I am poorest at with Japanese - I find it very difficult to watch anime, for example, without subtitles. This is partly because anime is just mental, but also because my listening skills suck. It's particularly annoying as there is a wealth of interesting stuff to watch in Japanese (if you're into anime and Japanese film), so I really want to get a better handle on that. To do this, I am going to try to listen to Japanese radio pretty much all day long every day.

Linguistics: In an attempt to rekindle an interest in the language, I bought "Japanese: A Linguistic Introduction", which is an overview of Japanese linguistics, going into historical stages of Japanese, modern dialects (of which there is a vast variety, many of which are not mutually intelligible) and it looks at grammar, phonology and morphology too. I was never into Japanese for its historical linguistic intrigue, but now I can add that to the reasons I like this language :).

Irish:

Most if not all of my previous plans are on indefinite hold, what I am doing now is - continuing to post here and be active on the Irish language internet scene, continue reading a novel I recently purchased (Irish translation of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe"), speak Irish whenever possible, listen to Irish radio/watch Irish TV (when I am not doing that with Japanese, which I will be most of the time).


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