Slight motivation

A few years back, I refused to by language books thinking it was a waste of money to buy a book whose contents I could find scattered all over the internet. Now I can't get enough of them and I'm always on ebay thoroughly searching for new language books. But I've always prefered to buy language books that don't belong to the big companies or series such as linguaphone, berlitz, Michel Thomas methods etc. I think it is how they advertise themselves. As someone who has been struggling for years to get a good command of French I know it is impossible to 'learn French in 3 months' as Hugo language books portray themselves or acquire 'Portuguese in 10 minutes a day'. They seemed false, as though they would teach you phrases from phrasebooks and the most advanced material would be the past tense. But now I'm starting to see differently and I'm becoming more interested in audio based courses. After all, these companies wouldn't have been established for years if they weren't good. I started unit 3 of FSI portuguese [which can be downloaded freely and legally from here] and was pleasantly surprised with the course. It may be slow but I'll definite be able to say to someone that 'Eu conheço a Maria. Ela é minha amiga.' It may be basic but I tend to be too quick to jump the boat and skip the basics so maybe it'll be good for me. I'll definitely be continuing with the course tomorrow. On another note, I don't think I know how to properly pronounce nasal sounds. Anytime I practice I'm left with a really sore throat. I'll need to look into it.

Progress 31/05/2010

Didn't do much today except come more to the conclusion that I have an adversion to Spanish. Anytime I set out to learn it I end up studying Portuguese instead. But I'm becoming very frustrated with Portuguese. I can never seem to find phrases to say things such as 'to leave school [pernamently]' or even 'to find an expression for' when I was complaining about not finding expressions on how to say things. It's weird how my reading skills in Portuguese are not far from being on par with that of my French reading skills yet all my other skills fall much further behind. I really need to practice my passive skills so I'm going to start going back onto www.lang-8.com which is a site where you can write in a journal and have native speakers correct your language for you. Any time I come across a new word or phrase, I'm going to practice writing sentences using that word to practice my writing skills.

Progress 30/05/2010

Studied a bit of French today which I've not been able to say in a long while. Skimmed over Chapter 1 of 'Living French' and found out things about pronunciation which I never knew but now my throat hurts from practing so I think I might stop studying French for today. Did two speaking exercises on Livemocha, the last of which took 30 minutes to perfect and read an article on AIDs in Africa which was good for some new vocabulary:

Au cours de - During
Par ailleurs - In addition

Just spent quite a while looking for example sentences but I found a website [which unfortunately has no translation] so I'm going to translate them and put them into my anki to practice with vocabulary to which I'm not yet accustomed.

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Started learning Chinese again. Chinese may be the subject that I'll be doing a degree on next year, depending on whether or not I get good enough grades to get into the university. I think I've been avoiding it to avoid disappointment if I don't get in but after finding a good song in Chinese [which in my opinion is hard to come by] my interested has been rekindled. I decided to review my anki deck of Chinese vocabulary [of which 200 word are now due to be reviewed due to my avoidance] and I was surprised at how easy it was to remember some of the characters. I may sign back up to Chinesepod for June but I'm undecided still.

Le français

Après 2 années de ne pas etudier le français, je commence à avoir envie de ameliorer mon nivel de français. J'aimerais maîtriser très bien la langue et je trouve que je pouvais lire un texte de nivel intermédiare mais je ne pouvais pas écrire des phrases les plus simples sans l'aide d'un dictionnaire. Donc j'ai compris un livre qui s'appelle 'Living French' de T W Knight pour m'enseigner les essentiels de la langue mais je vais encore continuer à augumenter mon vocabulaire en lisant les textes intermédiares.
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After two years of not studying French, I'm starting to want to improve my level of French . I would like to speak the language well and I find that I could read an intermediate level French text but I couldn't write the most simple sentences without the help of a dictionary. So I bought a book called 'Living French' by T W Knight to teach me the basics of the language but I will still continue to improve my vocabulary through reading intermediate texts.

Portuguese

14 / 300 words. 5% done!

French

30 / 300 words. 10% done!

Japanese

/ 300 words. 0% done!

Mandarin

6 / 300 words. 2% done!


Not too sure which pitiful month this was. Possibly February since that was the last time apart from today that I posted and I had prelims around that time. Let's not hope for a repeat in June!

Back from long hiatus

So due to school work and exams I've been neglecting language studying [which pretty much defeated the purpose of this blog] but I'm back now with a whole quatre of a year before university starts to study languages.
I've applied to study Chinese and Linguistics at Edinburgh university but my conditions to get in are tough so I'm not sure if I did well enough in my exams to secure a place on the course. If not then I'll hopefully be going to Stirling university to study French and Spanish with Latin Amercan studies. I don't really know that much Spanish and the majority of the Spanish that I do know is thanks to my better knowledge of French and Portuguese. If you have any background with Spanish [educational or otherwise] then you can start a more advanced course in first year of university so I'll hoping to use a good part of my time these three months getting my Spanish up to higher grade level [equivalent of AS level in England I think] which should allow me to pass the test to get into the advanced course come mid September. To achieve this, I'm going to start off using 'Basic Spanish' by Routledge publishers and then the website spanish.about.com whilst using this blog to list my progress and hopefully encourage me to learn more.
I'll still be learning Chinese incase I get accepted into Edinburgh, Japanese and French and now I might start learning some Russian since I got a good stack of 5 books on Russian off ebay.