Today I bring you a parallel translation of a famous scene from the brilliant German film "Der Untergang" (English: "Downfall") mostly about the last days in Hitler's bunker. The screenplay is by Bernd Eichinger who unfortunately passed away in 2011. He was also a producer for the film "Nirgendwo in Afrika" which I watched a couple of years ago. Apart from being a brilliant film, with the insanity of Hitler being portrayed astoundingly well by Bruno Ganz, it has also spawned a massive number of parodies based largely on providing new translations for a scene in which Hitler discovers that his last grand plan for saving Berlin from capture by the Russians could not be mounted due to a lack of manpower. I can't understand the criticisms of this film which say it humanises Hitler too much. He comes across as being completely deranged in the film!
Here's the link to my parallel translation:
Der Untergang - Szene: "Der Angriff Steiner ist nicht erfolgt"
Note that my source for the German was a subtitles file I found on the internet, but which needed some minor fixups at the start. The rest of it seemed fine. I did my own translation and learnt some new stuff along the way, like that "durchbrechen" has a few slightly different meanings - to "break through" as in "come through or suddenly appear", as well as "to break in two" both of which are separable verbs, and then there's the meaning of "break though and destroy the thing in the process, coming out the other side; to smash through" which is inseparable! It is this latter which appears in the text above ("zu durchbrechen" instead of "durchzubrechen"). I also learnt the expression for "to blow one's brains out".
You can find the original scene on youtube fairly easily - here's one that's working at the moment. I used RealPlayer's "Download this Video" and then "Save mp3" options to extract the audio so I can listen to it as I drive to work. Along with the fact that I had to listen to the beginning several times to figure out what corrections to make to the subtitles I was using, I have listened to it and am becoming quite familiar with it. When I feel like I hear every word fairly clearly, I'll find a scene from another movie.
This movie has quite clear audio and speaking overall, so I rate it as less challenging for the learner than movies like "Stalingrad" which is full of moody, wounded, mumbling soldiers, gunfire, explosions and howling winds. I think I'll find a challenging scene in that movie as my next target!
One final disclaimer: as usual, I claim no rights over any of the original text and especially not the audio of the movie! The translation is largely my own, but guided by the efforts of others. I post this here only to help other German learners improve their understanding and appreciation of the German language and cinema.
Enjoy!
Thursday, February 28, 2013
Monday, February 25, 2013
Latin resources
I've only really been doing my new languages passively at the moment (need to work on that for Chinese for sure!) so my list of resources isn't massive, but I can already offer a few useful pointers. Today I'll start with Latin.
One other note that wasn't in my review - it takes until lesson 62 to start getting much at all from the classical writers that are, after all, the whole point of learning Classical Latin, right? But at least from what I can tell, it's pretty much sections of the classics all the way out from there.[UPDATE: I've since found a few earlier passages which are based on classical authors - lessons 39, 41 and 45 are all I've noticed so far. However, 39 was more "inspired by" than based on. Lesson 41 seems to be a lot closer to the passage it's based on, and I assume they just get progressively closer to the original passage in later lessons, though I can't confirm that yet.]
Oh, wait, one important final note - it's in French. If your French is like mine (maybe, with a month or three of part-time study, I could pass the B2 exam in French, with the ability to read French novels with looking up plenty of words), then it should mostly be smooth sailing. I've only looked up one or two things in the first 28 lessons. Mostly, I can tell what is meant from context as well. It's a shame some of Assimil's catalogue isn't more widely available because their unique format should help disrupt the dumbed down modern book courses we usually find... But I digress...
However, I think people should probably not bother with the audio CDs. You can get the book on its own for a lot cheaper direct from assimil.com or perhaps somewhere else. Obviously, I don't plan on ever speaking Latin or needing to comprehend it in anything other than written form, but I figured that having the audio would just be an extra reinforcement for what I've learnt from the book which I can listen too while driving. However, although the recording quality is high (like all Assimil products) and the speakers seem to do their best most of the time, I find listening to it frustrating rather than reinforcing. The speakers do a pretty good job of putting on a classical latin accent, but they make various mistakes (french-style ones - like not pronouncing the "s" at the end of "klaras" in the phrase "klaras deorum fabulas", although the speaker didn't miss the final one). This means that you need to listen to the audio while reading a couple of times to pick out these mistakes and then to be able to recognise what's being said.
The other problem is that although the speaking speed is usually OK, words are sometimes run together or slightly mumbled, or nasalised where they shouldn't be (one speaker says "ambulant" in a very french way!). I would have thought that the focus for the recording wouldn't really be on trying to make it sound like a real-life conversation but rather on extremely clear and precise enunciation. Each letter should be very easily heard in each word, as learners won't need to get used to classical latin being used in any high-speed real world context, so the audio should just be a way to reinforce the learning through another medium, and to help people make best use of time when they can't read.
This all sounds quite negative, but actually the audio isn't totally useless, just that it's not quite what I expected, or what I think it should really be, and could be improved in a future edition. If you can get it cheap I'd say it's still worth having, but if I had known then what I know now I would just have bought the book on its own without the CDs and saved the extra money.
THE BIG ONE: Assimil's Le Latin
This is currently my primary source. I'm using the 2010 edition by Ducos-Fillipi listed here on Assimil.com. After having used it for a few weeks I felt qualified enough to write a review for a book website, which I've reproduced below the resources section. The short version is: I do recommend it, but just get the book itself. It's 25 euros from Assimil's own website, which isn't bad, but you'll find it cheaper on other websites like bookdepository.co.uk (they also have the older edition which has better support in the Latin learning community) and fishpond.com.au. Maybe even Amazon will have a good price on it. Who knows! Stranger things have happened!One other note that wasn't in my review - it takes until lesson 62 to start getting much at all from the classical writers that are, after all, the whole point of learning Classical Latin, right? But at least from what I can tell, it's pretty much sections of the classics all the way out from there.[UPDATE: I've since found a few earlier passages which are based on classical authors - lessons 39, 41 and 45 are all I've noticed so far. However, 39 was more "inspired by" than based on. Lesson 41 seems to be a lot closer to the passage it's based on, and I assume they just get progressively closer to the original passage in later lessons, though I can't confirm that yet.]
Oh, wait, one important final note - it's in French. If your French is like mine (maybe, with a month or three of part-time study, I could pass the B2 exam in French, with the ability to read French novels with looking up plenty of words), then it should mostly be smooth sailing. I've only looked up one or two things in the first 28 lessons. Mostly, I can tell what is meant from context as well. It's a shame some of Assimil's catalogue isn't more widely available because their unique format should help disrupt the dumbed down modern book courses we usually find... But I digress...
Web Dictionaries
You can find a few of these for Latin->English. This one was sort of OK, but so far they've left me kind of cold. The interfaces are clunky and you need to know the base "dictionary" part of speech, which I'm getting a feel for, but I'd rather just put in the exact part of speech and see some quotes in context. LUCKILY, I learnt German first, because the best online dictionaries I've found so far have been in German. There's Latein.me and the Pons set of dictionaries which has Latin to German as well as a bunch of other language combinations. This one is my favourite, but they both do a neat job of looking up the part of speech and giving you some quotes.Online Radio
This is perhaps the most surprising of all. After all these thousands of years, and in this age of communication that would have seemed almost magical to the Romans, there are still TWO radio broadcasts in Europe in Latin. The one that everyone normally mentions is this one from Finland, but I prefer the one from, you guessed it, Germany, on Radio Bremen's Latin page, which has translations of their articles into German and a proper RSS feed for the podcasts which is convenient for me. There is actually another German radio station which makes this same podcast available, but I found this one to be better. Both radio broadcasts suffer from an influence of the native language on the pronunciation, but, the German one at least (and possibly the Finnish - I haven't listened to theirs much) is spoken slowly and clearly. No, I don't intend to learn to speak and understand spoken Latin, but with probably a bit of initial work to study the news I will be able to listen to these podcasts as I drive to reinforce some of my other learningProgress Update
I can't let a post go by without a status update, so here it is. I've finished lesson 28 in Le Latin and lesson 30 in Chinese with Ease. The latter has really picked up the tempo so it takes more time to shadow the lessons without obvious errors which I really expected, but it's a new challenge. I do need to spend much more time working on pronunciation and getting those tones CONSISTENT because I usually surprise my co-workers in a bad way when I try to say something new :-)
To help with my German I've decided to take audio snippets out of movies and translate them and then memorise them and their translations (roughly - I don't need to be word perfect!) to hopefully improve my understand of movie dialogues in general. I'll add new words along the way, of course. I'm also up to page 155 in "Das Todeskreuz". It's quite slow because reading it is low down on my priority list. I really need to give myself more time each day just to read because I'm really enjoying the story. And, of course, I still listen to a variety of podcasts in German, with the occasional Latin news thrown in just for kicks (but without much comprehension!).
What else? My Anki reviews have suffered for a variety of reasons but the main one is that it doesn't work properly on my Nokia N97's Symbian browser anymore. The Chinese characters don't work at all, but even the German and Latin are all screwed up and slow to use compared to before. I do hope to have an Android phone soon, but I will have to hope that the AnkiDroid version comes out before that!
I would like some suggestions for interesting Chinese language podcasts on a variety of topics (I usually like science, the environment and world history and culture) and would love some with a Chinese perspective, although this isn't a high priority as comprehension is quite a way off. Also, of course, a good Mandarin news broadcast would be great! It should have RSS podcast feeds along with transcripts. Please drop your suggestions in the comments below!
To finish, here's my review of early review of Le Latin as promised. Other people's opinions are most welcome!
My Review of Le Latin
The book itself is excellent and really uses the Assimil method to its full advantage. I would like to see more classical authors being introduced early on in as minimally modified a form as possible to add interest to each lesson, as surely that's the main thing people will want to do after the course, but the lessons themselves are clear, concise and well thought out. The progression feels very natural and you get a feeling for latin word order, etc, early on, which is a great way to speed up your passive understanding for reading speed. It introduces the rules through use, and then later on revises those rules that you will have garnered through the lessons. You are meant, in theory, to do one lesson every day, and every seventh lesson is a revision lesson, which is the standard Assimil format. I am only in the early stages of the book, but I'm confident that I'll reach my goal of being able to read the more straightforward classics by the end of the course (with the help of a dictionary if necessary) which is exactly what I want.However, I think people should probably not bother with the audio CDs. You can get the book on its own for a lot cheaper direct from assimil.com or perhaps somewhere else. Obviously, I don't plan on ever speaking Latin or needing to comprehend it in anything other than written form, but I figured that having the audio would just be an extra reinforcement for what I've learnt from the book which I can listen too while driving. However, although the recording quality is high (like all Assimil products) and the speakers seem to do their best most of the time, I find listening to it frustrating rather than reinforcing. The speakers do a pretty good job of putting on a classical latin accent, but they make various mistakes (french-style ones - like not pronouncing the "s" at the end of "klaras" in the phrase "klaras deorum fabulas", although the speaker didn't miss the final one). This means that you need to listen to the audio while reading a couple of times to pick out these mistakes and then to be able to recognise what's being said.
The other problem is that although the speaking speed is usually OK, words are sometimes run together or slightly mumbled, or nasalised where they shouldn't be (one speaker says "ambulant" in a very french way!). I would have thought that the focus for the recording wouldn't really be on trying to make it sound like a real-life conversation but rather on extremely clear and precise enunciation. Each letter should be very easily heard in each word, as learners won't need to get used to classical latin being used in any high-speed real world context, so the audio should just be a way to reinforce the learning through another medium, and to help people make best use of time when they can't read.
This all sounds quite negative, but actually the audio isn't totally useless, just that it's not quite what I expected, or what I think it should really be, and could be improved in a future edition. If you can get it cheap I'd say it's still worth having, but if I had known then what I know now I would just have bought the book on its own without the CDs and saved the extra money.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Where to from here? Plans for 2013!
At about the same time as I got my results for the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 exam, I also got some horrible news when my mother was diagnosed with cancer which I mentioned in an earlier post. My wife and I also had our second baby in November of last year, and sadly in mid-January of this year my mother lost her long battle with cancer.
As a result, my time and focus for language study has been diminished. After passing my exam, I wanted to just enjoy using the language. I have continued to do so mainly by reading German novels (I'm currently reading Das Todeskreuz, up to page 154 out of 500+, and which I picked up for free while on holidays at a free book exchange), listening to the amazing array of high quality and informative German-language podcasts, and speaking once per week with my Austrian friend at work. Of course, this isn't enough to advance in the language. Actually, because my Anki reviews have suffered greatly, I probably haven't been maintaining my level. I'm not sure. Perhaps I'm being harsh.
Anyway, what's important in my view is the future, and what it holds. My family issues haven't stopped me from thinking about the future, and coming up with some plans. They've just mainly delayed me from writing them up here.
So, what's the plan for 2013?
I wanted to do an experiment to see if I could learn two languages at the same time to any useful extent. I'm not silly enough to pick two closely related languages which have the same endpoint, so that eliminates a few options :-) I have to be interested in them, of course. I have to want to speak/read them, and for those I need to desire to connect more with the culture, and have the opportunity to do so. In order to avoid overlap in goals and language types I decided to pick one ancient language purely for my amusement, and one modern language.
There were several choices I considered. My wife's family speaks Maltese, and I think that I might like to learn it to a lower B2 conversational sort of level someday, but the idea just didn't grip me this year. I have also long had a passion for Serbo-croat, even though I only ever learnt a little really. One of my best friends has a serbian dad and a croatian mum, and one of my work colleagues speaks Serbian, so there was some good opportunity for practice there. However, that work colleague is on maternity leave for most of this year so I figured it wouldn't be the best time to start. And besides, and let's face it, learning a language is a LOT OF WORK. Don't believe the hype you read - it's not a short road in terms of hours of effort. Even getting to a high B2 in German was quite a demanding task for me given my work and family time constraints, along with my other goals. I figured that I would therefore push it down my goal list. As much as I would love to learn it, I figured that some other languages I could choose might possibly lead to some sort of career advancement or opportunities, or just generally be somehow more useful, so I should push them up the list at this stage of my life when I still need to pay off my house and support my family :-)
I thought about the romance languages like Italian and Spanish, or even being sensible and improving my somewhat B2-ish (but as yet not formally tested) French to a proper qualified C1 or even C2. Now that I think about it, this latter was probably the better idea, but I just wasn't drawn to it this year. Probably because I know that starting on a new language and getting to that B1-ish sort of level of a lot less work than pushing a B2 to C1. At the beginning you can do different kinds of practice where you don't expect a really high level of precision from yourself. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, but the idea didn't appeal to me. Ditto for my German, which I would like to bring up to an official C1 or C2 level someday, and especially become much more comfortable in terms of understanding a broad range of everyday spoken material very accurately. Italian and Spanish just didn't do it for me. I like their movies, the cultures, the food, the countries. All of that. But for some reason, the spark just isn't there for me right now. Don't ask me why!
I even thought of pursuing my passion for Australian native languages by trying to learn one. The problem is that the speakers are few, remotely located and therefore difficult to access. I'm not sure what the quality of learning materials is like, but I know they don't have any Assimil courses for them :-) Also, apart from the few books I could find and the paucity of speakers, I also can't really find a lot of input material. No real podcasts or movies. There is one movie in a language I'm particularly interested in learning (called Ten Canoes - if you haven't seen it, you should check it out!), and possibly some radio programs, but other than that it's pretty bare. There are some University courses which I could do by distance learning, but these are prohibitively expensive ($440 for each course) when my goal is to spend little to no money on my language learning projects. I still have this thought bubbling away in the back of my mind, however, and plan to figure out how I can push this along in the future. But for now it needs to stay on ice I think...
In terms of ancient languages, there are only really a few standouts - Latin, Ancient Greek, Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Old English. I actually started on Old English at one stage, but just went off the rails and when I thought about it again late last year, I decided that what I would love to be able to do is read Caesar's "Conquest of Gaul" in its original language, along with many of the other latin classics. The Greek classics are possibly even more appealing, but for accessing the history of european culture, I think there's nothing like Latin. I would love to be able to read the Latin inscriptions of old monuments around Europe the next time I'm there, for example!
There's also an Assimil course for it (just like Ancient Greek and Egyptian, in case you're interested) so, the choice was made! My goal is to be able to read Caesar's "The Conquest of Goal" in its original, with minimal notes (mainly for cultural items) by the end of the year. Actually, I'm setting my goal for this to be mid-year, but definitely by the end :-) I ordered the Assimil course with audio as a Christmas present from someone who was struggling to find something for me. As a side note, I also got the Assimil album which purports to help young kids speak French (but I would say to just avoid it - it's not really in the Assimil style at all), and this book on swearing in German (which has already helped me understand my current German book mentioned above, Das Todeskreuz).
As for modern language, if you worked in my team, you would see that there's really only one choice. My small team has two fluent Mandarin speakers (also two fluent cantonese speakers) and my company in general has many chinese people. On top of that, my current home town of Sydney is heavily populated with chinese people, many of the older ones being Cantonese speakers, but more and more the mix is dominated by Mandarin speakers. I had also already bought the Assimil course for Mandarin three years ago (although I had never used them), so there were no new costs involved. Also, I love martial arts films, and am interested to get news about China from a chinese perspective rather than the dumbed version of international news we often get from the world's English-speaking press, so finding interesting content won't be a problem.
The good thing about this combination is that they're very different which has meant that, so far, I'm really not suffering any confusion of one on the other. Latin is a highly-inflected Indo-european language, and Chinese is completely the opposite. My goal in Latin is just to read the classics - I'm not really concerned with my own ability to compose into Latin and definitely not with speaking or listening - whereas my goal in Chinese is mainly to become a conversational speaker who can read a little bit of day-to-day stuff, although I have been adding chinese characters to my Anki list and can already identify a small number of these reasonably reliably.
So, there you have it - a seemingly unlikely combination of languages to learn at the same time, but this unlikeliness is what makes them such a good match, especially since they have different goals. As to what the exact goals are, I haven't fully fleshed these out yet, so I'll post more on each of these in the future, along with some of the tools I've already found to help me out along the way. And since we're so far into the year, I need to let you know how far I've got. So, I started at the start of the year with my Assimil lessons for each course and I'm currently up to lesson 28 in Chinese with Ease and lesson 26 in Le Latin (although I want to listen to the audio for lesson 25 again). I'm clearly not keeping up with the 1 lesson per day plan, but it's going OK. I generally don't do any on the weekends, though I should find the time to do a lesson of each somehow. I'll try to fix this going forward. I'll discuss how I tackle them specifically more in a future post. One thing I'm sure about - I'm glad I studied German before Latin, although you'll have to wait for my Latin resources post to find out why!
And what about German itself? Well, I don't have too many specific plans, but I do know that finding a high quality piece of audio, and then translating it and remembering the whole translation while I'm listening to the audio helped me massively, so I think I should find chunks of audio (perhaps from movies as well as podcasts), especially of everyday German and just really focus on one chunk at a time until I feel as though I understand everything that's being said "in real time", and then move on to another chunk. I haven't really started this yet, but I will do it soon and see how it goes. I can't focus massively on studying German this year (although I will happily be enjoying using it), but I feel that if I can manage to do something like this audio study once a month I can make some comprehension progress which has been lacking for a while. Of course, I would need to find time for my Anki reviews, which hasn't happened yet, partially due to some unfortunate changes in the new version of Anki which are steps backwards, if you ask me. Oh well, it is free after all!
As a result, my time and focus for language study has been diminished. After passing my exam, I wanted to just enjoy using the language. I have continued to do so mainly by reading German novels (I'm currently reading Das Todeskreuz, up to page 154 out of 500+, and which I picked up for free while on holidays at a free book exchange), listening to the amazing array of high quality and informative German-language podcasts, and speaking once per week with my Austrian friend at work. Of course, this isn't enough to advance in the language. Actually, because my Anki reviews have suffered greatly, I probably haven't been maintaining my level. I'm not sure. Perhaps I'm being harsh.
Anyway, what's important in my view is the future, and what it holds. My family issues haven't stopped me from thinking about the future, and coming up with some plans. They've just mainly delayed me from writing them up here.
So, what's the plan for 2013?
I wanted to do an experiment to see if I could learn two languages at the same time to any useful extent. I'm not silly enough to pick two closely related languages which have the same endpoint, so that eliminates a few options :-) I have to be interested in them, of course. I have to want to speak/read them, and for those I need to desire to connect more with the culture, and have the opportunity to do so. In order to avoid overlap in goals and language types I decided to pick one ancient language purely for my amusement, and one modern language.
There were several choices I considered. My wife's family speaks Maltese, and I think that I might like to learn it to a lower B2 conversational sort of level someday, but the idea just didn't grip me this year. I have also long had a passion for Serbo-croat, even though I only ever learnt a little really. One of my best friends has a serbian dad and a croatian mum, and one of my work colleagues speaks Serbian, so there was some good opportunity for practice there. However, that work colleague is on maternity leave for most of this year so I figured it wouldn't be the best time to start. And besides, and let's face it, learning a language is a LOT OF WORK. Don't believe the hype you read - it's not a short road in terms of hours of effort. Even getting to a high B2 in German was quite a demanding task for me given my work and family time constraints, along with my other goals. I figured that I would therefore push it down my goal list. As much as I would love to learn it, I figured that some other languages I could choose might possibly lead to some sort of career advancement or opportunities, or just generally be somehow more useful, so I should push them up the list at this stage of my life when I still need to pay off my house and support my family :-)
I thought about the romance languages like Italian and Spanish, or even being sensible and improving my somewhat B2-ish (but as yet not formally tested) French to a proper qualified C1 or even C2. Now that I think about it, this latter was probably the better idea, but I just wasn't drawn to it this year. Probably because I know that starting on a new language and getting to that B1-ish sort of level of a lot less work than pushing a B2 to C1. At the beginning you can do different kinds of practice where you don't expect a really high level of precision from yourself. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong about this, but the idea didn't appeal to me. Ditto for my German, which I would like to bring up to an official C1 or C2 level someday, and especially become much more comfortable in terms of understanding a broad range of everyday spoken material very accurately. Italian and Spanish just didn't do it for me. I like their movies, the cultures, the food, the countries. All of that. But for some reason, the spark just isn't there for me right now. Don't ask me why!
I even thought of pursuing my passion for Australian native languages by trying to learn one. The problem is that the speakers are few, remotely located and therefore difficult to access. I'm not sure what the quality of learning materials is like, but I know they don't have any Assimil courses for them :-) Also, apart from the few books I could find and the paucity of speakers, I also can't really find a lot of input material. No real podcasts or movies. There is one movie in a language I'm particularly interested in learning (called Ten Canoes - if you haven't seen it, you should check it out!), and possibly some radio programs, but other than that it's pretty bare. There are some University courses which I could do by distance learning, but these are prohibitively expensive ($440 for each course) when my goal is to spend little to no money on my language learning projects. I still have this thought bubbling away in the back of my mind, however, and plan to figure out how I can push this along in the future. But for now it needs to stay on ice I think...
In terms of ancient languages, there are only really a few standouts - Latin, Ancient Greek, Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Old English. I actually started on Old English at one stage, but just went off the rails and when I thought about it again late last year, I decided that what I would love to be able to do is read Caesar's "Conquest of Gaul" in its original language, along with many of the other latin classics. The Greek classics are possibly even more appealing, but for accessing the history of european culture, I think there's nothing like Latin. I would love to be able to read the Latin inscriptions of old monuments around Europe the next time I'm there, for example!
There's also an Assimil course for it (just like Ancient Greek and Egyptian, in case you're interested) so, the choice was made! My goal is to be able to read Caesar's "The Conquest of Goal" in its original, with minimal notes (mainly for cultural items) by the end of the year. Actually, I'm setting my goal for this to be mid-year, but definitely by the end :-) I ordered the Assimil course with audio as a Christmas present from someone who was struggling to find something for me. As a side note, I also got the Assimil album which purports to help young kids speak French (but I would say to just avoid it - it's not really in the Assimil style at all), and this book on swearing in German (which has already helped me understand my current German book mentioned above, Das Todeskreuz).
As for modern language, if you worked in my team, you would see that there's really only one choice. My small team has two fluent Mandarin speakers (also two fluent cantonese speakers) and my company in general has many chinese people. On top of that, my current home town of Sydney is heavily populated with chinese people, many of the older ones being Cantonese speakers, but more and more the mix is dominated by Mandarin speakers. I had also already bought the Assimil course for Mandarin three years ago (although I had never used them), so there were no new costs involved. Also, I love martial arts films, and am interested to get news about China from a chinese perspective rather than the dumbed version of international news we often get from the world's English-speaking press, so finding interesting content won't be a problem.
The good thing about this combination is that they're very different which has meant that, so far, I'm really not suffering any confusion of one on the other. Latin is a highly-inflected Indo-european language, and Chinese is completely the opposite. My goal in Latin is just to read the classics - I'm not really concerned with my own ability to compose into Latin and definitely not with speaking or listening - whereas my goal in Chinese is mainly to become a conversational speaker who can read a little bit of day-to-day stuff, although I have been adding chinese characters to my Anki list and can already identify a small number of these reasonably reliably.
So, there you have it - a seemingly unlikely combination of languages to learn at the same time, but this unlikeliness is what makes them such a good match, especially since they have different goals. As to what the exact goals are, I haven't fully fleshed these out yet, so I'll post more on each of these in the future, along with some of the tools I've already found to help me out along the way. And since we're so far into the year, I need to let you know how far I've got. So, I started at the start of the year with my Assimil lessons for each course and I'm currently up to lesson 28 in Chinese with Ease and lesson 26 in Le Latin (although I want to listen to the audio for lesson 25 again). I'm clearly not keeping up with the 1 lesson per day plan, but it's going OK. I generally don't do any on the weekends, though I should find the time to do a lesson of each somehow. I'll try to fix this going forward. I'll discuss how I tackle them specifically more in a future post. One thing I'm sure about - I'm glad I studied German before Latin, although you'll have to wait for my Latin resources post to find out why!
And what about German itself? Well, I don't have too many specific plans, but I do know that finding a high quality piece of audio, and then translating it and remembering the whole translation while I'm listening to the audio helped me massively, so I think I should find chunks of audio (perhaps from movies as well as podcasts), especially of everyday German and just really focus on one chunk at a time until I feel as though I understand everything that's being said "in real time", and then move on to another chunk. I haven't really started this yet, but I will do it soon and see how it goes. I can't focus massively on studying German this year (although I will happily be enjoying using it), but I feel that if I can manage to do something like this audio study once a month I can make some comprehension progress which has been lacking for a while. Of course, I would need to find time for my Anki reviews, which hasn't happened yet, partially due to some unfortunate changes in the new version of Anki which are steps backwards, if you ask me. Oh well, it is free after all!
Sunday, February 10, 2013
Learning any language - a perspective...
I read something recently about teaching and learning australian indigenous languages which discusses techniques that actually have a surprising broad applicability. The link is here:
Grammar rules, OK?
What works when teaching a highly endangered
Aboriginal language versus a stronger language?
It's interesting for its discussion of how to learn a language in the process of being revived, but it also has this overview of how to learn a language with access to good material and native speakers (which the paper terms "strong" languages) and since this is the situation for most languages average people are interested in learning, I figured I would repost an excerpt here:
The following list outlines just some of the sound teaching methods and
techniques that are possible when teaching strong languages:
1. Being an active listener, constantly listening to the language at home on pre-recorded CDs of narratives and language drills.
2. Constructing long texts in class with all the discourse markers and styles of a healthy language that is still spoken fluently.
3. Looking, thinking and listening to the teachers as he/she models natural dialogues.
4. Mimicking the teacher as he/she models natural sentences with fluent speech, using the intonation and pragmatics of the language.
5. Getting the teacher to record long sentences onto student iPhones.
6. Consulting the many sentence examples in the contemporary dictionary which outlines the different senses and uses of words in natural sentences.
7. Putting away the books and pens, on a regular basis, and having longer and more sustained oral language sessions in just the target language, with no English.
8. Seeking out speakers in an effort to develop an ear for the language and gaining a good passive knowledge of the different genres of the language.
9. Being prepared to go outside student comfort zones, and practise regularly speaking the language with fluent speakers, and making mistakes in front of others in an effort to learn the correct usage of the language.
10. Trying to learn idiomatic usage of the language and practise using idioms in one’s speech.
A lot of this list applies at all stages of learning. You will just get different outcomes from each approach depending on your current level, but all should help move you forward.
Pretty straight forward, right? So let's all get on with it :-)
Grammar rules, OK?
What works when teaching a highly endangered
Aboriginal language versus a stronger language?
It's interesting for its discussion of how to learn a language in the process of being revived, but it also has this overview of how to learn a language with access to good material and native speakers (which the paper terms "strong" languages) and since this is the situation for most languages average people are interested in learning, I figured I would repost an excerpt here:
The following list outlines just some of the sound teaching methods and
techniques that are possible when teaching strong languages:
1. Being an active listener, constantly listening to the language at home on pre-recorded CDs of narratives and language drills.
2. Constructing long texts in class with all the discourse markers and styles of a healthy language that is still spoken fluently.
3. Looking, thinking and listening to the teachers as he/she models natural dialogues.
4. Mimicking the teacher as he/she models natural sentences with fluent speech, using the intonation and pragmatics of the language.
5. Getting the teacher to record long sentences onto student iPhones.
6. Consulting the many sentence examples in the contemporary dictionary which outlines the different senses and uses of words in natural sentences.
7. Putting away the books and pens, on a regular basis, and having longer and more sustained oral language sessions in just the target language, with no English.
8. Seeking out speakers in an effort to develop an ear for the language and gaining a good passive knowledge of the different genres of the language.
9. Being prepared to go outside student comfort zones, and practise regularly speaking the language with fluent speakers, and making mistakes in front of others in an effort to learn the correct usage of the language.
10. Trying to learn idiomatic usage of the language and practise using idioms in one’s speech.
A lot of this list applies at all stages of learning. You will just get different outcomes from each approach depending on your current level, but all should help move you forward.
Pretty straight forward, right? So let's all get on with it :-)
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