TAC 2015: Español, English, Français, Русский

[dEhiN]

[flag=]es[/flag] I'm going to improve my Spanish and build upon the basics I learned last year. My target is to stack up on vocabulary and practice the many verb forms Spanish has.

[flag=]en-us[/flag] New vocabulary, new colloquialisms, better pace and pronunciation. C2, I'm coming for you. Hopefully.

[flag=]fr[/flag] Wait till I knock you out you tricky bastard.

[flag=]ru[/flag] Из России с любовью...

[flag=]ja[/flag] いつか日本に行きたいから日本語を学んでいます。

[flag=]zh[/flag] 我想学中文因为我要到中国去

That's quite ambitious! Good luck with all of them! How are you studying them? What resource(s) are you using for each language?

[Saim]

¿Qué significa el la frase ahora mismo?

La palabra frase es femenina.

[dEhiN]

¿Qué significa el la frase ahora mismo?

La palabra frase es femenina.

Gracias.

[OldBoring]

But he said he removed Russian, Japanese and Mandarin in this post.

[הענט]

Added, not removed.

[OldBoring]

Shit..... añadido = added, not removed

[הענט]

Update: Removal of Chinese and Japanese, because it's too much even for a TAC!!!

[vijayjohn]

What do you mean by "even for a TAC"? Aren't TACs supposed to be pretty hard? Typically, I find that most people don't manage to do what they originally set out to.

[הענט]

Learning one language basically from scratch and improving 3 others isn't hard enough?

[vijayjohn]

Sure, it is. It's just that to me, saying that something is "too hard even for a TAC" implies that TACs are not hard, and I think TACs are hard!

[Dormouse559]

On the contrary, I think saying that a set of goals is hard even for a TAC implies that TAC's are hard and that the goals exceed even that level.

[vijayjohn]

Ahhh, okay. That makes sense.

[Trapy]

Learning one language basically from scratch and improving 3 others isn't hard enough?

Ehh... Learning from scratch is easy. Improving from beginner to intermediate I find difficult . You go from phrases and words to rules and modifications.

[vijayjohn]

Learning one language basically from scratch and improving 3 others isn't hard enough?

Ehh... Learning from scratch is easy.

Depends on which language!

[dEhiN]

Learning one language basically from scratch and improving 3 others isn't hard enough?

Ehh... Learning from scratch is easy. Improving from beginner to intermediate I find difficult . You go from phrases and words to rules and modifications.

I've heard many say that going from intermediate to advanced or even advanced to fluent is quite difficult, least because it's hard to see any progress and progress tends to be slower.

I think going from beginner to intermediate, while perhaps difficult in terms of learning rules and such, is easier in terms of seeing progress and then feeling that you're actually achieving your goals.

[הענט]

I agree with Dehin. Leaving the beginner grounds and achieving the intermediate level is actually possible within a month or two. It just gets harder onward, because there's so much to learn.

[הענט]

It's funny that I only recently learned how to pronounce certain German words after seeing its IPA

Anyway. Russian got sidetracked and I'm going to concentrate more on German and French until the end of this TAC.

[vijayjohn]

Wait, when did you start doing German? Just now?

[Lemanensis]

I agree with Dehin. Leaving the beginner grounds and achieving the intermediate level is actually possible within a month or two. It just gets harder onward, because there's so much to learn.

Not only, IMHO, but also because language is a pyramid - all the basic stuff recurs very often, but the further you go, the more you're trying to learn language that is repeated less often, so it doesn't get reinforced as much.
The words you hear every day go in very easily and basically you can get by on most of those, so the more advanced words become less important, even when you can't express the idea without them.
It's said that some farming communities get by with an active knowledge of just a few hundred words... though they understand a lot more. Part of my study problem is moving passive vocabulary into the active zone. I'm forever thinking "but I know this word", and it just won't come back...

[dEhiN]

I agree with Dehin. Leaving the beginner grounds and achieving the intermediate level is actually possible within a month or two. It just gets harder onward, because there's so much to learn.

Not only, IMHO, but also because language is a pyramid - all the basic stuff recurs very often, but the further you go, the more you're trying to learn language that is repeated less often, so it doesn't get reinforced as much.
The words you hear every day go in very easily and basically you can get by on most of those, so the more advanced words become less important, even when you can't express the idea without them.
It's said that some farming communities get by with an active knowledge of just a few hundred words... though they understand a lot more. Part of my study problem is moving passive vocabulary into the active zone. I'm forever thinking "but I know this word", and it just won't come back...

But what about the various conjunction and subordination words that are typically considered intermediate and/or advanced vocabulary? They are used and repeated often by native speakers. Obviously for a beginner second language learner, you can get by fine with really simple sentences and using simple conjoining words (such as the equivalent of "and" in whatever language). But my experience is that I wasn't ready to learn the conjunction words until A2 or B1, and then the real work began of learning the subtleties of each word. Yet I doubt the difficulty is due to lack of exposure. I think it's just more due to the complexity of the concept being expressed. You see the same thing (afaik) in children who are exposed to probably all the core vocab over the first however many months to years before they learn to speak. Yet when they start speaking, they also can only string together basic sentences.