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Emme’s Small Steps - Team Sleipnir TAC’15 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4948 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 169 of 360 31 July 2013 at 9:08pm | IP Logged |
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I think it's counteproductive to get rid of study all of a sudden. If you can't open a textbook anymore, then try at least to read something in your TLs. I don't think you'll have trouble reading some Swedish. Let go the mini-challenge or 6WC if it does boher you and prevents you from just reading what you like; still, try to insert some small chunks of language-learning-friendly texts on the go. As you speed up with your TLs, you'll feel like adding more of the stuff-you-'r-dying-to-read to your language learning pile.
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| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 170 of 360 01 August 2013 at 5:00pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the advice, Expugnator.
I’m still considering whether to join the 6wc or skip it this time. I’m trying to understand if the TY/LL experiment will start or not. Maybe, for the time being, I could sign up and drop out later if I see I can’t muster the energy for it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 171 of 360 14 August 2013 at 9:36am | IP Logged |
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In the end I signed up for the 6wc. I’m not being especially productive at the moment, but considering that I come from a couple of months (June and July) when I did almost no intensive language studying at all, the little I’ve managed in these first weeks of the challenge is already a big improvement. So I have to admit that the 6wc has already done what it’s supposed to do: i.e. push you to do more than you would otherwise. Officially my target language is Swedish but right now I’ve probably done more studying in Russian. The truth is that I’m almost certain that in the long run (i.e. the month and a half of the challenge) I’m more likely to log in several more hours for Swedish than for any other language (apart from English, of course). Moreover, this must be one of the last times I am allowed to choose Swedish as my target language: I am quite confident that I’m soon leaving behind the vaguely defined beginner/lower-intermediate level required of the 6wc target language. My aim for the next few months is making sure that in 2014 choosing Swedish again will be out of the question. The 6wc is also helping me get the book and film count for the German mini-SuperChallenge moving. I haven’t updated the list of what I’ve read and watched since early June. I must try to remember to write them here on the log before I lose the slips of paper where I’ve jotted them down. I already lost some titles last summer and I’d better not repeat that this year, especially since I’m still quite behind schedule if I want to complete the challenge by December. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4948 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 172 of 360 14 August 2013 at 8:24pm | IP Logged |
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Nice to know you're about to leave the lower-intermediate level for Swedish! It's my
level in Norwegian now. I hope you can find nice native media to keep working on it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 173 of 360 15 August 2013 at 12:09pm | IP Logged |
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Oh, working with native media is the least of my problems, especially now when a good internet connection lets you stream hours of radio, watch episodes upon episodes of TV shows and read tons of newspaper articles online.
If you consider that I started learning Swedish through an overload of short-wave radio (when listening to short-wave radio was really hard due to the combination of a weak signal and the poor quality of my radio) plus a few treasured newspapers, now I really have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to native media. My problem is the opposite: keep working through textbooks to really make (measurable) progress in the language. That’s where my admiration for your learning method comes from: you seem to be able to breeze through textbook after textbook as if it were a walk in the park, and I truly envy you this capacity. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 174 of 360 25 August 2013 at 7:47pm | IP Logged |
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I’ve spent the last few days watching the Swedish TV-series ‘Ett köpmanshus i skärgården’ before it disappears from SVTPlay tonight. I’ve found it quite difficult and that’s interesting, since I usually consider period drama as the easiest kind of film or TV-series to understand (in English). Earlier this year I watched the present-day set ‘Molander’ series and it was surprisingly accessible, even without subtitles. ‘Ett köpmanshus i skärgården’ is set in Bohuslän in the 1830s, and what with the period dialogues, and what with the dialect (with many characters speaking in some sort of “almost Norwegian”) I must admit it was one of the most difficult programmes I’ve ever watched on SVTPlay.
On the Russian front (gosh, that makes it sound as if learning Russian is a war, whereas right now it’s a rather pleasant journey for me), I’ve been enjoying the RusslandJournal.de podcast. One of the usual complaints I often read on this forum about language podcasts is the unbearable amount of annoying banter they contain. In this case I think banter is kept to a minimum, even though of course at the end of every lesson they repeat their contact information and such like. I’ve only done the first few lessons, but so far it seems well structured and it reinforces what I’ve already learnt with other courses. If you study Russian and your German is half decent, you should check it out to see if it works for you. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4948 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 175 of 360 26 August 2013 at 8:14pm | IP Logged |
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Learning Russian IS a war =D Though it seems I'm finally managing to advance somehow,
even though Russian is the language I put the least time on. I think I am consolidating A1 and filling in some gaps for A2. Glad to see you're having a nice time with series for Swedish. I am really appreciating the Norwegian series I'm watching. As of the 4th episode in the 2nd series, subtitles seem to fail to sync, and I think this will rather encourage me to let them go little by little :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5129 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 176 of 360 30 August 2013 at 3:01pm | IP Logged |
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A couple of days ago Cavesa in her log announced a personal challenge: taking the Swedex B2 in the summer of 2015 starting Swedish almost from scratch. As I told her, I think it’s probably doable if quite exacting as far as the amount of work one has to plan to achieve that goal.
Her enthusiasm made me wonder: what would it take me to reach B2 and maybe take the Swedex in a couple of years? I’ve been muddling on at about A2 for quite a while, without seeing much visible progress. Maybe because my passive skills are much higher (probably in the B1-B2 region) than my active ones and I can already do almost all that I want in the language (watching TV, reading articles, tackling easier novels, etc.) I’ve been lacking the incentive to really improve my overall proficiency. So, inspired by Cavesa’s chutzpah I’ve dug out some information by the Folkuniversitet I had downloaded a few years ago. Somehow their new site isn’t as easy to navigate as it used to be and I couldn’t find those data again. Anyway, here we go. Starting with no previous knowledge of Swedish one should be able to reach the CEFR B2 level after taking 6 courses of about 60 lessons each (in parenthesis I give the cumulative number of hours): A0 to A1/A2 (60) A1/A2 to A2+ (120) A2+ to B1 (180) B1 to B1+ (240) B1+ to B2- (300) B2- to B2 (360) This progression is consistent with most data about the increasing amount of guided teaching hours needed to move up from one CEFR level to the next, but I should note that the overall amount estimated for Swedish is considerably lower than the average for other languages. This seems to confirm that Swedish is among the easiest languages a westerner can learn. Some examples: From the Deutsche-Welle site for German: A1.1 <75 hrs A1.2 75 hrs A2.1 150 hrs A2.2 225 hrs B1.1 300 hrs B1.2 400 hrs ALTE’s estimation for European languages: A1 90-100 hrs A2 180-200 hrs B1 350-400 hrs B2 500-600 hrs C1 700-800 hrs C2 1,000-1,200 hrs Now, if one speculates about taking the exam in June 2015 (even though the examination dates are spread over the entire year according to this), one has 21 months from September of this year to May 2015 to prepare. If you take as a reasonable division between levels the one proposed by the Folkuniversitet, you have to move up one of the six levels indicated above every 3-4 months if you start from A0 or one level every approximately 5 months if you start from A2. Even if you take into account that you are supposed to study on your own when you attend a course (personal study time increases as one reaches higher levels: I’ve read somewhere that at A0-A1 one is supposed to study maybe half an hour to an hour for every class taken, whereas at C1-C2 one works on his own for 2-3 hours or even more for every class), the amount of work doesn’t seem totally out of reach for a determined person. Let’s suppose that to be on the safe side the day of the exam we plan to put in, on average, a couple of hours’ of further studying every “class hour” we need to reach a level, that makes 180 hrs of studying for each of the levels: not too bad, considering we can spread them over 3 to 5 months. So it seems that with an average of one to two hours a day (depending on your beginning level) one can probably reach the B2 mark by the summer of 2015. That doesn’t mean it will be a walk in the park, nor that I’ve decided to try it, but the temptation is there and maybe following Cavesa’s challenge will give me the kick in the a** I need to try and follow suit. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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