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Osias wrote:Gràcies!
Saim wrote:Russian
I'd like to push this language closer to where my French and Hungarian are, i.e. to a higher level of aural comprehension. For now I'm going to mostly focus on reading and listening and making flashcards, not bothering to write or speak much.
Summary: Some reading, some listening, lots of flaschards
Other than all that, I've been jumping around between Mandarin, Arabic, Basque and Turkish a lot but I think I might slow down some of the other ones to push Turkish forward a bit. I'd like to spend some more time watching Turkish series although I'm not sure how to make time for it given the amount of Serbian I want to listen to. Maybe I can watch a season of something in Turkish or Russian for every two seasons of a Serbian series.
Saim wrote:I'm going to try out langcorrect.com for output, it seems like a nice spiritual successor to lang-8 (which is pretty much dead as the owner has switched over to "Hello Native", which I find pretty useless). Hopefully there are some French and Hungarian natives over there.
księżycowy wrote:Yeah, I think I'm gonna start trying to do that as well. Lang-8 was pretty good, and I think it was a stupid decision to stop taking in new users.
I'm just hoping there are enough Japanese and Chinese users on there to be a helpful tool.
Car wrote:I saw it on reddit, decided to sign up after your post, but I just don't know what to write about. That also stopped me from writing on italki. Quite ironic considering I'm sure it's usage that would help my French and Spanish the most.
księżycowy wrote:That's frequently my problem.
Writer's block.
Saim wrote:I'm going to try out langcorrect.com for output, it seems like a nice spiritual successor to lang-8 (which is pretty much dead as the owner has switched over to "Hello Native", which I find pretty useless). Hopefully there are some French and Hungarian natives over there.
księżycowy wrote:That's frequently my problem.
Writer's block.
Synalepha wrote:If you like translation, I'd suggest Squaring the Circle by Gheorghe Săsărman (the original is in Romanian, the English translation is by Ursula K. Le Guin and the Spanish one by Mariano Martín Rodriguez, not sure if it's available in other languages too).
Basically it's a collection of short stories which are in fact descriptions of several invented cities. The language is not too difficult, the stories are really short (2-3 pages) so you get a sense of satisfaction from finishing them quickly and it's just an interesting book overall. Lately, I myself have been having fun translating it from English to Ladin.
Saim wrote:Maybe try looking up some writing prompts? I saw some pn r/languagelearning and r/russian which could serve as inspiration.
Saim wrote:SRS?
Serbian
I'm happy with my progress. My pitch accent perception is quite good and I'm much better at expressing myself than a year ago. This week I started reading a light novel in Cyrillic and was kind of frustrated by my reading speed, so I think I'll make all of my Anki cards in Cyrillic from now on.
Antea wrote:I think that reading a novel is always difficult because they use a special literature vocabulary, and a more complicated way to express things. I also tried to read a novel in Russian, and I had to drop it because of the vocabulary they employed. But when I read articles in Russian on internet, I find that I can understand them, and I don’t get so tired.
Saim wrote:I've started reconsidering my usage of Anki.
The only thing is that srpskijezik.com doesn't allow you to cut-and-paste so I'm not sure how to get the pitch marks into my cards, I guess I'll just have to use hrvatski jezični portal and have any pitch information in Latin. I don't even known how to get all the pitch marks to show in the Latin script, I just copy and paste them from the dictionary all the time.
I’m quite advanced in Serbian though and I’ve already read a couple of novels, and this one is actually relatively simple (there are new words of course, but not so many compared to some other books I’ve read). The reason I’m not reading it as quickly as I’d like has to do with the fact that it’s the first Serbian book I’ve read in Cyrillic, everything else has been in Latin.
vijayjohn wrote:Ah-HAH!
Maybe you could try using Wiktionary. They have the pitch marks available in both Latin and Cyrillic.
Did I tell you once that I read two novels in Malayalam simultaneously over more than a year? This sort of thing was why I did that (not that I'm recommending that approach...).
And then my dad went to India, brought back a novel he'd told me about reading when he was growing up, and told me to drop everything and read that. So I did, and it took me less than two weeks IIRC.
Saim wrote:Antea wrote:I think that reading a novel is always difficult because they use a special literature vocabulary, and a more complicated way to express things. I also tried to read a novel in Russian, and I had to drop it because of the vocabulary they employed. But when I read articles in Russian on internet, I find that I can understand them, and I don’t get so tired.
Oh yeah, of course, that’s a major difficulty with reading novels in general. I’m quite advanced in Serbian though and I’ve already read a couple of novels, and this one is actually relatively simple (there are new words of course, but not so many compared to some other books I’ve read). The reason I’m not reading it as quickly as I’d like has to do with the fact that it’s the first Serbian book I’ve read in Cyrillic, everything else has been in Latin.
If I was reading at this speed in Hungarian or Russian I would be fine with it, it’s just that I know that I can read faster but I’m not used to Cyrillic.
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