Me Learning Languages

A good site for chating in different languages

2011-06-09T20:21:00.001+03:00

I found a great site where you can chat (voice or text) in different languages:
http://www.sharedtalk.com
http://adf.ly/1kRoY (Please enter via this link and not the first!!)

First of all you need to sing up to this site.
Next you'll be taking to your home page, from there you can check your mailbox, enter voice chat, enter text chat, find language parters for yourself nad much more.

The site is very interactive and feels very nice to use, everything goes smooth and it looks more like a software than a site.

I hope you'll find this post useful.

Peace :)

Colloquial Portuguese - Unit 1 - How much can you remember?

2011-04-09T08:46:00.001+03:00

Today, about a week after I finished the first unit, I made the last part of the unit which called "How much can you remember?" and it's like a review questions about the whole unit.
Some of the question were pretty easy but some took me a lot of time to think about.

So what can I do in Portuguese for now:

Say different greetings.
Asking about someone's nationality.
Simply introducing myself.

Not much, but it's only the first unit of the book.

Peace

Colloquial Portuguese of Brazil - Unit 1

2011-04-02T14:26:00.000+03:00

After practicing Portuguese pronunciation a bit with FSI, I decided to move to Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese. I finished 2 units and then decided to try Colloquial Portuguese of Brazil.

The book starts with a short explanation of pronunciation.
Unit one (Oi, tudo bem? - Hi, is everything OK?) starts with a dialogue, the dialogue basically shows different types of greetings and asking "how are you?".

Later, the book moves to grammar and covers the following topics:

The verb ser (to be)
Regular and irregular verbs.
Uses of present indicative tense.
Negatives.
Forming feminine adjectives.
Yes, no.
The definite article. (In English - "the")
The indefinite article. (In English - "a/an")
Forming the plural.

The vocabulary topics that are covered are:

Greetings
Introducing someone
Ordering food and drink.

As you can see there are much more grammar topics than vocabulary topics, and this is one of the main differences that I noticed between this book and Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese, in the Teach Yourself book, most of the topics in each unit were vocabulary, and in Colloquial most of the topics are grammatical.
This book is much harder to follow up than the Teach Yourself and few times I felt myself pretty lost, the order of the topics in the Colloquial book looks stranger and harder than Teach Yourself.

However, I still plan to continue the Colloquial book combining is with Teach Yourself Portuguese Grammar instead of Teach Yourself Brazilian Portuguese, but maybe I'll do some units from it too.

I feel that I learned some new topics in Portuguese although I new most of them from the Teach Yourself book already, few things I didn't quiet understand but I hope they'll repeat it in Unit 2.

Leaving to boarding school ;(

2011-01-11T20:22:00.002+02:00

I'm going to leave to a boarding school soon so I will hardly have a time for language learning and for posting posts. I'll try to post on weekends.

Peace :)

FSI Portuguese Programmatic Course - Unit 1

2010-12-09T15:41:00.002+02:00

So I decided to learn Portuguese :) and I want to test the FSI Portuguese Programmatic Course for that.

FSI (foreign service institute) are totally free language courses that you can download legally from their site:

http://www.fsi-language-courses.org/Content.php

The course looks a bit strange at first, each unit made of "frames" and under each frames there are ( ) or ( )x, for example:

82. That is the pronunciation we will use in these frames. Mimic it again.

tar- ( )x ( )x

83. The second syllable is -de. Just listen.

-de ( ) ( )

I forgot to add that the course contains audio, what these () mean is that you need to listen to the audio of that frame, if there is an 'x' after them, it means that you need to listen and repeat.

The unit started with explanation of the nasal sounds in Portuguese, first it just previewed it in audio, than asked to repeat, and at last showed how the sound it written and than listen and repeat again. I personally think that they should more explain how to pronounce the sounds and not only previewing them and asking to repeat as close as possible.

Also here and there were some 'exchanges' - small dialogs of 4 lines, each dialog is recorded once with pauses to repeat and once without pauses just as in normal conversation.

Totally there were 6 dialogs in unit one and 123 frames.

This is the end of unit one :)

Peace :)

Esperanto flashcards

2010-11-27T13:30:00.003+02:00

So this morning I decided to review my flashcards from the 2 Esperanto lessons, in total there are 83 flashcards.

I did only the Esperanto-->English cards and not English-->Esperanto, but I think I'll add them soon.

Most of the words went pretty good, and I remembered them 5/5 but I stucked on few words that I reviewed them about 20 times each and they still didn't get into me, but in the end I finished them somehow, mostly by guesses :D

Peace :)

Seconed lesson in Esperanto

2010-11-26T20:10:00.002+02:00

So, after a big pause in learning I found time to continue language learning again. After not learning for a month I even lost my Esperanto notebook so I had to start a new one :D I briefly skipped over the first lesson without doing the exercises and moved to lesson 2.

Before starting lesson 2 I opened my mnemosyne deck and did the 39 flashcards from lesson 1, I forgot most of them, some I remembered and some I guessed because of the similarity to English and other languages.

So I started Teach Yourself Esperanto Unit 2 - La Ĉambro (The Room), it started by explaining adjectives in Esperanto, personal pronounces, and then asking and answering yes/no questions, also it showed of cause the words jes (yes) and ne (no/not).

It was followed by 3 writing exercises (I didn't make them all because I felt bad today).

Than correlatives, and the prefix mal- which makes the oposite of a word (for example: bela = beautiful, malbela = ugly; bona good, malbona = ugly).

Than a shirt text describing a room, 3 writing practices again, dialogue and few questions about it.

After the lesson I added the vocabulary list to my mnemosyne deck, 44 additional vocabulary.

End of lesson 2 :D

Peace...

I'm back

2010-11-21T20:53:00.002+02:00

So, I wasn't here for some time, had somethings to do. From now I'm back to this blog and will continue posting my progress :)

Peace

First lesson in Esperanto

2010-10-30T22:00:00.002+02:00

I started with Teach Yourself Esperanto Unit 1 - Familio kaj domo (family and home).

First it showed the Esperanto pronunciation which is very easy. Than it showed the numbers.

After that it gave some small vocabulary such as: patro - father, besto - animal, filo - son, domo - house, hundo - dog. Than it explained how to from plural (by adding a 'j' in the end of the noun). It showed some more words such as 'the', 'and'. It continued by explaining the present tense.

After that came the first two practices, the first one is few sentences written in Esperanto which you have to translate to English, and the second one is vice versa - few sentences written in English which you need to translate to Esperanto.

It showed the affixes: ge-, -in- and -ej-.

Than there was two translate practices this time with more words and the 3 new affixes.

In the end it gave a 39 words vocabulary which I added to my mnemosyne deck.

End of my first Esperanto lesson :)

Introduction to Esperanto - Why I started to learn it?

2010-10-30T16:52:00.002+02:00

Well, Esperanto, for those of you who don't know, is a constructed language, which means that it's much easier than normal language. Esperanto uses the same alphabet as English do but it has some letters have diacritics and the pronuncation differs a bit.

Esperanto is a phonetic language which means that every letter can describe only one sound. In English for example, one letter can describe more than one sound:

c in cat and c in cigarette

I'm going to start learning Esperanto with Teach Yourself Esperanto and than I will probably move to something else.

My first Arabic letters

2010-10-29T17:55:00.002+02:00

So here I started to learn the Arabic alphabet, I'm using Teach Yourself Beginner's Arabic Script with the Arabic wikibook: http://he.wikibooks.org/wiki/%D7%A2%D7%A8%D7%91%D7%99%D7%AA/%D7%9E%D7%93%D7%95%D7%91%D7%A8%D7%AA/%D7%90%D7%9C%D7%A3-%D7%91%D7%99%D7%AA

First letter is Alif ا which is very similar to the Hebrew letter Alef א.

Then I learned the "teeth letters" (بـ‎تـ‎ثـ‎نـ‎يـ‎).

I added all these 6 letters (5 teeth letters + alif) to a free software called mnemosyne which is a flash card software.

On one side of the flashcard I wrote the name of the letter in Hebrew letters and on the other side, the Arabic letter itself.

Introduction to Arabic - Why I started to learn it?

2010-10-29T17:30:00.002+02:00

I started to learn Arabic about a week ago.

One of my main reasons for learning Arabic is the big number of Arabs in Israel, and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Arabic and Hebrew (my native language), are pretty related languages, both Semitic. However their scripts are totally different (though both are written from right to left). Here is an example of the sentence "My name is Daniel" written in Hebrew and Arabic (I used Google Translate for Arabic):

Hebrew - קוראים לי דניאל

Arabic - اسمي دانيال

So one of my first missions will be learning the Arabic script as I will show in my next posts.

Introduction

2010-10-29T17:12:00.002+02:00

Hello, my name is Daniel and I'm from Israel.

I started this blog as a log of my language learning progress.

Right now, I know 3 languages:

1. Hebrew - Native language - Use it everyday around.

2. Russian - Secondary native language - Use it everyday in my family (my family immigrated to Israel from Ukraine so they speak Russian). I don't know Russian grammar good because I never learned it at school.

3. English - Basic fluency - Learned (and learn) it from school. Usually I use it for Internet.