Hallo liebe Leserinnen/Leser!
Heute probiere ich etwas neues aus. Ich habe beschlossen, dass ich muss mehr Zeit auf Deutsch verbringen. Hier im Blog ist der beste Ort damit anzufangen.
Also, als ich früher erwähnt habe, ich lese im Moment ein sehr interessantes, gut geschriebenes Buch, das heißt Das grössere Wunder. Ich habe nur bis zur 193en Seite erreicht, deshalb muss diese Rezension kurz sein.
Es ist im Großen und Ganzen die Geschichte eines Manns und seiner Kindheit. Gleich am Anfang sind wir in einer chaotischen Szene im Basislager von Mt Everest. Die zwie ersten Sätze stellen die Stimmung für den ersten Kapitel:
"Das Gestern stand klar vor ihm, das Soeben schwand, zerfloss, ungreifbar und verbraucht.
An seinem Zelt wurde der erste Leichnam vorbeigetragen, notdürftig bedeckt mit einer im Wind flatternden Plane."
Ich muss ja zugeben, dass gleich an diesem Punkt hatte ich schreckliche Angst, weil es im ersten Satz zwei Wörter fehlt! Soeben war mir unklar, obwohl es offensichtlich im Gegenteil zum "Gestern" stand. Dazu auch die bedeutung von zerfließen fällt mir nicht ein. Grauhafter Anfang! Ich habe aber gerade durch ein paar Worthäufigkeitlisten gesucht und habe entweder die Wörter nicht gefunden, oder in der zweiten Hälfte einer 10.000 Wörter beinhaltenden Liste. Hier gibt's ein paar Worthäufigkeitlisten:
Von Filmuntertiteln genommen
Von woher bloß weiß ich genommen
Ich habe trotzdem weiter gelesen, und da bin ich froh darüber! In den früheren Kapiteln fand ich alles ein bisschen unwahrscheinlich, und es gab Dialoge die nicht wirklich echt klang. Ich habe vergessen Beispiele zu halten, aber macht nichts. Umso mehr ich gelesen habe, desto besser ging es mir. Der Schreibstil ist leicht zu lesen, sogar wenn mir noch ein paar Wörte fehlen, und besessen von einem subtilen, untertrieben Humor. UND GOTT SEI DANK, weil eine Menge Gewalt steht auch da drin! Im gegensatz zu die Unwahrscheinlichkeiten, habe ich für den Humor einen guten Beispiel beibehalten! An der 188en Seite lass sich es finden eine Szene, in der die Hauptfigur (namens Jonas) erholt sich im Basislager nach einem Gesundheitsschrecken und sein Freund Marc ihn zu einem von Marc vorgeschlagenen Arzt bringt. Der Arzt hat gerade von Jonas blut genommen, um eine Blutsättigungswerte zu bestimmen, und redet über den gesundheitlichen Gefahr auf 7000 Metern und ob Leute die Zeichen selbst erkennen können:
"Gestern sind zwei Australier angekommen, die heute gleich weiter aufgestiegen sind. Entweder sie haben Glück und merken selbst rechtzeitig, wie mies es ihnen geht - und es wird ihnen bei Gott mies gehen -, oder sie verbrigen die nächsten tausend Jahre da oben. Ein Pflaster noch, damit das Kind nicht weinen muss. So. Bin gleich zurück."
Der Arzt verschwand im Zelt nebenan.
"Guter Kerl", sagte Marc leise. "Begnadeter Arzt und komischer Kauz. Hat schon die Pest gehabt."
"So alt wirkt er aber auch wieder nicht."
"Nein, im Ernst."
"Er hat die Pest gehabt?"
"Ja, fast wäre er dran gestorben."
"Wo kriegt man denn die Pest?"
"Keine Ahnung. Irgendwelche Ratten vielleicht?"
Weiss nicht genau, warum mir diese Szene so gut gefallen ist. Es ist nur so.
Das war's für heute. Ich hoffe, dass ich die Zeit finde, um dieses Post zu übersetzen. Inzwischen könnt ihr euch selbst machen!
Ich freue mich auf eure Kommentare! Tschüß!
Showing posts with label Update. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Update. Show all posts
Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Der Erlkönig by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe - a parallel translation
I don't know how, but somehow I missed this a long time ago - I made a parallel translation of "Der Erlkönig" by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe which I did in April last year. I also found some free audio of it. Here they are:
My own loose parallel translation
The audio on youtube
To get the audio as an mp3, I just use RealPlayer. It has a plugin that lets you download streamed videos from youtube and you can then extract the mp3. Easy :-)
I didn't put much effort into the translation so don't base your exam preparation on my vocabulary choices! Comment below if you find any issues.
My preparations for what I plan to do in trying to achieve the C2 level exam by the start of next year have not really got started very well. I know I really need to speak German every day, but that certainly hasn't happened yet and the year is almost 1 month down. I have a few plans of attack on this problem which I will discuss more in my future posts.
I'm currently reading a new German book after reading one of the several books in English which I got for my birthday and Christmas (both around the same time). This book was lent to me by my Austrian friend at work. Called das größere Wunder, it is written by an Austrian author but set all over the world. I've had it for a couple of weeks and am about 10% of the way through it. I'll try to pick up the pace a bit! I'll write some more thoughts about it soon as it was a bit of a shock to me in some ways and a great test for my current abilities helping to show me the way to some improvements.
My own loose parallel translation
The audio on youtube
To get the audio as an mp3, I just use RealPlayer. It has a plugin that lets you download streamed videos from youtube and you can then extract the mp3. Easy :-)
I didn't put much effort into the translation so don't base your exam preparation on my vocabulary choices! Comment below if you find any issues.
My preparations for what I plan to do in trying to achieve the C2 level exam by the start of next year have not really got started very well. I know I really need to speak German every day, but that certainly hasn't happened yet and the year is almost 1 month down. I have a few plans of attack on this problem which I will discuss more in my future posts.
I'm currently reading a new German book after reading one of the several books in English which I got for my birthday and Christmas (both around the same time). This book was lent to me by my Austrian friend at work. Called das größere Wunder, it is written by an Austrian author but set all over the world. I've had it for a couple of weeks and am about 10% of the way through it. I'll try to pick up the pace a bit! I'll write some more thoughts about it soon as it was a bit of a shock to me in some ways and a great test for my current abilities helping to show me the way to some improvements.
Tuesday, April 2, 2013
zunehmen, abnehmen und... annehmen?
Man, oh man... I believe it was only last week that I posted an update about how relaxed, confident and comfortable I had felt in my regular weekly Stammtisch. I also predicted that that could easily be completely different next week. And it was. I felt quite awkward in my Stammtisch yesterday. I straight away couldn't think of the words I wanted to use, nor an alternative way of expressing myself, and it knocked my confidence right at the start. I never really recovered. Sometimes you're up, and sometimes you're down. What had changed? I'm not sure, but when I think back I realise that I haven't listened to German much in the last week, especially not to my two current snippets of German movies that I know fairly well (click these links to find my parallel translations and a link to the videos for short scenes from Der Untergang and Mädchen Mädchen 2), but I also haven't written much in German in the past week, whereas I had corresponded with a few of my German-speaking friends in the week before. A whole week with no other practice is just too long. I'm guessing that at a very high, advanced level of ability those sorts of gaps won't make too much noticeable difference because a small loss from a very high level is still very high. With my extended period of minimal focus on German, and being only an intermediate level, the cracks start to appear very quickly. I've been a naughty boy!
There are a bunch of reasons, probably primarily that I'm trying to learn two new languages to a basic fluency level this year! I've been thinking that I need to make sure I speak German more often each week, but to be honest it'll probably be good enough to just make sure I keep up my correspondence with my German-speaking friends. This probably fits in with my available time the best, because although I'd like to find more chances to actually speak German, I definitely need to find time to practice speaking Chinese.
All this brings me in a roundabout way to the title of this post: zunehmen, abnehmen und... annehmen. I have in the past often find myself stumbling over the various meanings of these sorts of similar sounding words. There was a time when I never seemed to be able to choose the correct word out of "anmelden" (register) and "abmelden" (cancel a registration), although I think I mostly get it right now. One day, a few months back, I ran into my Austrian friend at work who had been exercising more and eating better and had therefore lost a fair bit of weight. I wanted to let her know that her efforts were working and I said that she looked really different because "du hast so viel angenommen!" which I intended to mean "you've lost so much weight!". However, rather than seeming pleased she looked at me askance. I immediately thought that maybe she felt it was inappropriate to make such a comment, but that's just how I am. I make the same sorts of comments to my male friends as well, so I was just treating her equally. I decided to just move on and not to dwell on it and we had a little chat, but as I walked away and then for several days afterwards I couldn't stop thinking about it because I decided that, on the model of "anmelden" vs "abmelden" I had, in fact, told her that she had put on a lot of weight! MY GOD! I don't normally say that to anyone, but especially not a woman! I felt terrible and wasn't sure if I should apologise or just hope that she would assume I meant to say the opposite.
It took me about two weeks of mulling this over in my mind before I realised that what I had said to her didn't really mean much at all, because the opposite of "abnehmen" isn't "annehmen" it's "zunehmen".
What an idiot I am!
I said, pretty much out of the blue (no supporting context): "You have assumed so much!" or perhaps "you've taken so much". Nice work!
Oh well... Hopefully it will all stick in my head better now that I've mulled it over so much :-)
So here are our contrasting pairs for the day:
abnehmen vs zunehmen
abmelden vs anmelden.
Don't say I never tell you anything useful!
To end up, here's my progress update:
Mandarin: Currently shadowing lesson 45 which I do until I can follow the whole main dialogue at full speed without tripping up to within my own reasonable approximation of correct pronunciation. I also watched part of an episode of "Real Chinese" on TV. Being in Australia I can't watch the full episodes online. Although there's a lot of speaking in English on these shows, I think they're actually quite good for a beginner stage just to give some phrases and pronunciation practice, with an understanding of Chinese culture. Also, they have longer, unsubtitled monologues for more advanced speakers. The episode I was was, unfortunately, the last one, so I won't end up seeing them all until they get repeated. 真糟糕!
Latin: Currently still working on lesson 44.
German: I'm up to page 207 in "Das Todeskreuz". I really don't spend much time at all reading this, as you can tell. I should though because it's a good read.
There are a bunch of reasons, probably primarily that I'm trying to learn two new languages to a basic fluency level this year! I've been thinking that I need to make sure I speak German more often each week, but to be honest it'll probably be good enough to just make sure I keep up my correspondence with my German-speaking friends. This probably fits in with my available time the best, because although I'd like to find more chances to actually speak German, I definitely need to find time to practice speaking Chinese.
All this brings me in a roundabout way to the title of this post: zunehmen, abnehmen und... annehmen. I have in the past often find myself stumbling over the various meanings of these sorts of similar sounding words. There was a time when I never seemed to be able to choose the correct word out of "anmelden" (register) and "abmelden" (cancel a registration), although I think I mostly get it right now. One day, a few months back, I ran into my Austrian friend at work who had been exercising more and eating better and had therefore lost a fair bit of weight. I wanted to let her know that her efforts were working and I said that she looked really different because "du hast so viel angenommen!" which I intended to mean "you've lost so much weight!". However, rather than seeming pleased she looked at me askance. I immediately thought that maybe she felt it was inappropriate to make such a comment, but that's just how I am. I make the same sorts of comments to my male friends as well, so I was just treating her equally. I decided to just move on and not to dwell on it and we had a little chat, but as I walked away and then for several days afterwards I couldn't stop thinking about it because I decided that, on the model of "anmelden" vs "abmelden" I had, in fact, told her that she had put on a lot of weight! MY GOD! I don't normally say that to anyone, but especially not a woman! I felt terrible and wasn't sure if I should apologise or just hope that she would assume I meant to say the opposite.
It took me about two weeks of mulling this over in my mind before I realised that what I had said to her didn't really mean much at all, because the opposite of "abnehmen" isn't "annehmen" it's "zunehmen".
What an idiot I am!
I said, pretty much out of the blue (no supporting context): "You have assumed so much!" or perhaps "you've taken so much". Nice work!
Oh well... Hopefully it will all stick in my head better now that I've mulled it over so much :-)
So here are our contrasting pairs for the day:
abnehmen vs zunehmen
abmelden vs anmelden.
Don't say I never tell you anything useful!
To end up, here's my progress update:
Mandarin: Currently shadowing lesson 45 which I do until I can follow the whole main dialogue at full speed without tripping up to within my own reasonable approximation of correct pronunciation. I also watched part of an episode of "Real Chinese" on TV. Being in Australia I can't watch the full episodes online. Although there's a lot of speaking in English on these shows, I think they're actually quite good for a beginner stage just to give some phrases and pronunciation practice, with an understanding of Chinese culture. Also, they have longer, unsubtitled monologues for more advanced speakers. The episode I was was, unfortunately, the last one, so I won't end up seeing them all until they get repeated. 真糟糕!
Latin: Currently still working on lesson 44.
German: I'm up to page 207 in "Das Todeskreuz". I really don't spend much time at all reading this, as you can tell. I should though because it's a good read.
Monday, March 25, 2013
Update: 25/03/2013
Hey readers!
There are a few things I've been looking to post recently but time has conspired against me getting any of them out yet. However, I don't want to go too long without a progress update so here it is.
By the way, I still don't have any good sources for chinese podcasts for either various levels of stuff or the news, so any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated!
There are a few things I've been looking to post recently but time has conspired against me getting any of them out yet. However, I don't want to go too long without a progress update so here it is.
Mandarin
I finished lesson 42 in Chinese with Ease a few days ago. I haven't done more since because I wanted to bring my latin studies up to par with my Chinese ones and also because I don't do as much on the weekends normally because I don't spend as much time in the car, and when I do, it's with my family, so listening intently is right out. I find some lessons much much harder than others. I think this is a combination of just certain features causing me problems and the way I approach particular lessons. My "ideal" day in the early stages of German when using "German with Ease" was to listen several times to my new lesson in the morning while making breakfast, then reading the dialogue a couple of times so that I had some idea of all the new words and to then spend the rest of the day re-listening and trying to shadow, and reading more where necessary. However, these days I make my breakfast the night before work to speed up my departure in the morning and eat it at my desk at work, which takes away that opportunity. I try to do as much reading as I can before leaving for work and the rest I do while stuck in traffic, but still, it's not as "ideal".
Anyway, I managed to get the last few words from the first 14 lessons into my Anki list (this process is a long way behind for both Latin and Chinese because it is SOOOO slow) and have reviewed them a bit. In general, since it's become harder to do Anki reviews on my phone thanks to the new version not working well on my phone's browser anymore.
As for conversations, I've started trying to say a few sentences in the morning to one of my co-workers. We had a short one recently where I learnt how to say that I hadn't slept enough, or that I had slept well, or at all. Pretty useful! Obviously, I need to work on tones and vocab to make these conversations stretch out
somehow beyond a few seconds!
By the way, I still don't have any good sources for chinese podcasts for either various levels of stuff or the news, so any suggestions here would be greatly appreciated!
Latin
I just today finished lesson 42 of Assimil's "Le Latin". Lesson 41 was actually a reasonably close quote from a work by Cicero. Pretty exciting day! It's going OK, although I don't have all the tenses clear in my head. The forms as well as the actual usages. I need to work on this more. I am at least getting to know the noun declensions a little "by assimilation", so that's a good start. Although I've only done 42 lessons in each language, I just worked out that today is the 84th day of the year which means that I've managed to average one lesson per day across the two languages which is an effort I'm pretty pleased with. I'm starting to give them both better focus when I do them which is helping. The year started out pretty horribly for me in other ways, so I like to think that at least I'm making some progress in some sort of goal this year. I also listened to a recent news podcast from Radio Bremen. I didn't really understand any of it except for the name of the previous pope, so it was a bit of a waste of time, but I enjoyed it anyway.
German
No real formal study, but I have found a tiny bit more time to read "Das Todeskreuz" and am now up to page 195. Also, without really trying, I managed to pretty much memorise Hitler's rant from that famous scene in Der Untergang. I think it might come in handy as a party trick some day. I did feel a lot more relaxed and flowing in my last Stammtisch which might have been a result of listening to the above rant and the spilt coffee scene from Mädchen Mädchen 2. Or I might have just felt relaxed that day and tomorrow I'll go backwards again. Who knows! If anyone else has an experience of using the above mentioned parallel translations, let us know in the comments.
Bininj Kunwok
No, I haven't officially added this one to my learning list for the year, but it keeps calling me all the same. I'm talking to the guy running the site for learning it that I mentioned before and hoping that I can help out in some way because I really believe in it, and I actually hope that I can help spread the word and make it used beyond its original target audience of people working in the areas of the northern territory where the language groups are spoken. WHY AREN'T AUSTRALIAN SCHOOLKIDS LEARNING SOME ABORIGINAL LANGUAGE? I just don't get it. I love european languages and I'm learning Mandarin myself, but we could really do with learning some more about our homeland's cultural heritage and making its original inhabitants feel that what they have is valued more widely. But like I said, I haven't added this language for now. I did however learn their word for goodbye: bobo. It's often been pointed out that Australians have at least a very basic knowledge of a variety of european languages but can't even say hello or goodbye in a single Aboriginal one. Let's change that now, hey?
bobo.
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!
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