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When there's nothing left to lose...
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| 谁要学习汉语？！ |
[Jul 28th, 2030 @ 12:06am] |
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张智成《迷魂阵》完整版MV |
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Who wants to learn Chinese with me?
Today I got the Rosetta Stone full Mandarin Chinese program (Lessons 1, 2, & 3) in the mail. And I'd hate to have to take this journey alone.
I'm not just saying this to other sinophiles or students of the Chinese language. If you already know Chinese, I would love to beg assistance and criticism from you from time to time. If you're learning another language (via Rosetta Stone or whatever other avenue), feel free to drop by and chat about similarities / differences between our studies. If you know anyone who fits in any of these categories, send them this way!
I'm using Rosetta Stone as a part of a piece-meal study program I've put together for myself. I use Serge Melnyk's free Podcast in the car for pronunciation, comprehension, and basic conversation skills. I use Transparent's Word of the Day to gain additional vocab and learn sentence structure. Finally, I go to YellowBridge's character dictionary to learn character radicals, traditional forms, and how to draw them correctly. Melnyk and YellowBridge both offer paid memberships that open additional features, but Rosetta Stone is thus far the only one I've paid for. The free programs had been helping with my studies, but I'm hoping that incorporating Rosetta Stone will bring my learning to the speed I'm seeking.
I'll backdate this entry so it stays at the top of my blog, so scroll down and feel free to hop on this language learning adventure with me! I'm looking at different options of fun things I can do with this... Sound clips of pronunciation, videos or photos of writing, and as always around this blog...
( Music Videos! )
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| Once again... |
[Nov 23rd, 2009 @ 1:21pm] |
I think my last post in the ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) esperanto community was one of the first times I've gone to a language community, made mistakes, and not had the crap beaten out of me verbally by the other community members :) Hope they're ready for today, as I'm sure to make even more mistakes in my Esperanto venture for today...
Sometime soon, I'll try to update this from home, so as to be able to attach a voice recording :D
( More attempts to create grammatically sound Esperanto sentences... )
I'm SO TIRED today...
Mi estas TRE LACA hodiaŭ...
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| 9 languages to come in this post... |
[Nov 19th, 2009 @ 12:54pm] |
This is phenomenal. I started nurturing an interest in Esperanto nearly 6 years ago as a freshman in college. It was short-lived, and I spent years hardly THINKING about the language. Recently, however, I've found that Esperanto just may be a way for me to keep up on learning multiple languages.
You all know my affinity for Transparent's Word of the Day website. That's where all of my Dutch sentences have come from. Today, I ran away with that idea, and it became quite the lingsplosion. So, without further ado...
( Jen la miaj frazoj de hodiaŭ, esperantigitaj de latina, itala, nederlanda, franca, portugala, germana kaj hispana! )
I've also found some reliable online Esperanto resources...
-www.freelang.net/ - English - Esperanto Dictionary
-www.swahili.it/ - HUUUUGE Italian - Esperanto dictionary
-commons.wikimedia.org/ - 1930's French - Esperanto dictionary
-uebersetzung.babylon.com/ - Online Translator German - Esperanto
-aulex.org/ - Spanish - Esperanto dictionary
:)
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| 'Speranto. |
[Nov 16th, 2009 @ 1:02pm] |
The Dutch sentence of the day was too hard for me to translate into Esperanto:
Op de kinderboerderij is het toegestaan om vorzichtig de konijntjes te aaien.
I probably could have figured it out, but I'm still lacking a reliable Esperanto dictionary. This leaves me without a real avenue to find the words for petting zoo, allowed - I don't even know how to form these participles in Esperanto yet, rabbits, and to pet.
That means the best I can come up with is...
En la kinderboerderij ĝi estas toegestaan om zorge aaien la konijntjes-jn
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EDIT! For those of you who were REALLY anxious to find out how I resolved this, I now have:
En la kinderboerderij oni darfas zorge dorloti la kunikletojn.
Now, I just need the word for Petting Zoo / Kinderboerderij...
EDIT EDIT!
-Ĉe instead of en
-La besto - Beast, animal. La bestejo - Animal place, zoo. La besteto - little / small animal. La bestetejo - Small animal place... Petting Zoo!
-Havi rajton instead of darfi
-Karesi instead of dorloti
Put it all together, and we translate!
Ĉe la bestetejo, oni havas rajton zorge karesi la kunikl[et]ojn.
I guess kuniklo would suffice here, since bestetejo already contains the -et- diminutive signifying that the animals in the petting zoo are small...
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So... instead, we'll just jump to a different foreign language.
Franca:
Le ciel est tout blanc. Il va neiger.
Esperanto:
La ĉielo estas tute blanka. Ĝi iras neĝi.
Fino.
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| Look, I remember English! |
[Nov 13th, 2009 @ 3:12pm] |
But I'm still going to use it to talk about things not in English.
I was telling ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) murasaki_blue about how lately, I want to get better at Dutch and Esperanto. That's not very difficult, considering I've never studied either of them.
So usually I would follow this up by saying, "I'm going to post here every day about what I learned!", but every time I try to do that in LJ, I get bored and give up.
SO!
Here's today's edition (first and possibly sole edition) of "Ron got a sentence of the day in Dutch, and he's going to try to translate it into Esperanto"!
Nederlands:
Wil je kijken hoe we de geiten melken?
Esperanto:
Ĉu vi volas vidi kiel ni melkas la bovinojn?
I would really love to find a reliable online English - Dutch and/or English - Esperanto dictionary. Both are pretty e-scarce as far as I can tell.
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| Room for rent immediately! |
[Oct 14th, 2009 @ 12:52pm] |
Hey everyone who still reads my Livejournal!
If you may be interested with me in a 2-bedroom 1st floor apartment near the Wegmans on Amherst St. in Buffalo, @ $300 / month rent, comment! I'm happy to talk or meet with you at your convenience.
(Even if you aren't interested in renting, but can point me in the right direction for housemate-seeking, I'd be so appreciative if you let me know!)
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| 汉语BlogPost #1 - How much Mandarin I know |
[Jul 28th, 2009 @ 1:46am] |
Chinese isn't the first foreign language I've studied... Most of you know that. I'm pretty solid with French and Spanish, my undergraduate majors. I've taken 2 years of Arabic, but really can't do much useful with the language. I took a year of German, and I'm actually impressed from time to time by how much of that I've been able to retain. I've taken to listening to some Italian radio and trying to pick that language apart bit by bit. Dutch and Brazilian Portuguese are 2 languages in which I have very limited capabilities, but I love how both of them sound.
I started studying Chinese at the end of 2008, when I signed up for a 2-week Summer course in International Marketing as part of my Masters program at St. Bonaventure University. As I mentioned before, I haven't been able to move these studies at the speed I wish, so it's been a slow process. But here's what I've learned so far:
I'm up to lesson 9 with Melnyk, talking about the weather. I've found that I need to listen to a lesson as many as 20+ times before I really feel comfortable with it, though I don't always get daily practice with the program. Since I don't subscribe, I only get the listening, not the PDF worksheets. Thus, I don't always know the pinyin for the phrases he teaches. I did, however, hear an ivy-league student tell me that Serge's Chinese pronunciation sounds better than that of the female he has pronounce the vocab (who I've assumed is Chinese?) Nonetheless, up to this point, I've done basic greetings, introductions / asking names, food, hobbies, and now weather. This program will give me more meat for the blog once I get to the heavier lessons. For now, I'm obsessed with the phrase 马马虎虎。:)
Transparent's words of the day have, in my opinion, been of GREAT use to me, because I've gotten to practice reading, writing, and pronunciation. So, I'm able to write these sentences:
王先生要买什么？
他学习汉语。
他们都是学生。
我去过英国。
德国在欧洲。
法国也在欧洲。
看奥运火炬! I know this last one is OH SO USEFUL.
For each new character I learn, I make a small flashcard with the character, pinyin, general definition, radical / number / meaning, and traditional form, and I pin them up around my cubicle. Then I have other flashcards with various words that can be formed with those characters. There are many more characters that I can than those above, but those are just the ones I've learned from Transparent.
When I was studying Spanish, and learned that nosotros and vosotros both formed respectively out of "nos y otros" and "vos y otros", it dawned on me that it would seem so simple to just have plural pronouns be formed by... tada! pluralizing the singulars. After I got over the excitement of not having to conjugate verbs in Chinese, imagine my delight to find that 们 turns "I" in to "we", "you" into "you all", and "he" into "they"! How convenient!
I know this entry was vague, but I figured I should just get out of the way a general idea of how my Chinese is at this point in time. And judging from the amount of English in the entry, I hope you can tell... it's limited.
So, tell me. In beginning to study any foreign language, what little points did you find most exciting? I look forward to finding out!
Until next time... 再见！
Ron
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| Beijing! 北京 :) |
[May 29th, 2009 @ 9:23am] |
This is a long shot, but let's see...
Is anyone on my flist in Beijing, by any chance? I've had the GREAT LUCK to be in China with a group of 20 American students who think the best thing they can do with their time here is nap... all the time.
Anyhow, I'm itching to get out of my hotel room. If you're in Beijing and want to meet up, let me know!
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| Oh, Sunday. |
[Apr 26th, 2009 @ 11:05pm] |
Oh, PostSecret...
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