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IronMike

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Everything posted by IronMike

  1. Introduce your Great Aunt to Skype and talk with her regularly!
  2. Grasyas for this!
  3. Your comment here reminded me of this funny demotivational poster:
  4. Sometimes the kids' shows can be too hard/colloquial/fast. What I like to do is watch shows that I know in my native tongue but watch in an L2. I watch Воронины/Voroniny, which is basically Everybody Loves Raymond done Russian-style. The episodes are pretty much the same, so I can follow along easier than watching something like Comedy Women or other Russian sit-coms. They also have a plagiarized version of Married With Children, but it is so dang colloquial I just can't follow it. What also works for me is watching some reality TV in Russian. They've got a show called Магаззино/Magazzino, where a guy goes around and inspects grocery stores. He speaks quickly, but the subject is pretty limited in vocab, so not too bad to follow. There's also one called Орел и Решка/Heads or Tails, where two hosts show up in a city somewhere and flip a coin. The winner gets to spend whatever they want while in the city and the other gets $100 to spend for the weekend. Very fun to watch and the vocab isn't too difficult.
  5. My first experience living overseas (well, except that I was born abroad, but left when I was 18 mon old) was in Germany in the late '80s. I didn't know a lick of German, not even ein bisschen. My first night I went to a restaurant with a couple of guys who knew German. They had found out where a nice place was, so two U-bahn changes later, we're at the Italian place (only to find out later there was one about 200m from where we were living). We all ordered pizza, not knowing what else to order, and of course pepperoni because, well, pepperoni. Imagine our surprise when we were each served our very own pizza with long squiggly green peppers on it. At that moment I looked at those two "German speakers" and laughed. I promised myself to take a German course as soon as possible. Since then, anywhere I was living (Italy, Saudi, Afghanistan, Iraq, Denmark), no matter how short (2 weeks to 4 months to 4 years), I made sure to learn enough of the "Berlitz-y" stuff so that I could at least get food, beer, shelter and use the bathroom.
  6. Another new podcast: Aminda Radio: https://djpod.com/amindaesperanto
  7. Whenever I travel, I try my best to learn some of the language before going, and then insist on trying to speak it as much as possible while I'm there. I "refreshed" my Croatian when we went to Croatia (3 weeks!) and it certainly helped. Same with Gaelic when we went to the Outer Hebrides and Cornish when we went to Cornwall. I've never officially traveled specifically for language reasons, like to attend an immersion or something like that, although I'd love to.
  8. I read a novel in Esperanto (Viktimoj) as well as many short stories. Lots of short stories in Russian and BCS. In the non-fiction realm, I've read a couple linguistics books in Russian and plenty of periodicals in Russian, Esperanto and BCS.
  9. Thought I'd start this thread to save Esperanto resources as I find them. I put (dot) in the video URLs to keep the site from embedding the videos. Video: https://www.youtube(dot)com/user/Evildela https://www.youtube(dot)com/channel/UCvPiONpmjJEyvC5tWBKg1hA https://www.youtube(dot)com/channel/UCe37NyafpwjSoDXsXG1qFoA https://esperanto-tv(dot)com/ http://filmoj(dot)net https://www.youtube(dot)com/watch?v=9GGdi_nFQA0 Reading: http://edu.i-lo.tarnow.pl/esp/lern/librejo/0032/index.php http://www.liberafolio.org/ http://esperanto-ondo.ru/ http://facila.org/ http://www.esperanto-sumoo.strefa.pl/libroj.html http://www.gutenberg.org/files/24525/24525-h/24525-h.htm http://esperanto.net/literaturo/noveloj/index.html http://lingvakritiko.com/ Listening http://claudepiron.free.fr/enregistrements.htm http://members.aon.at/aldone/retradio/ http://esperanto.cri.cn/ http://pola-retradio.org/ http://esperanto-tv.com/vinilkosmo http://sezonoj.podfm.ru/esperanto/
  10. The lifeprint.com site is good for ASL. My daughter used it for a while. Love the language. Would love to study it more seriously someday.
  11. @sillylucy and @Trellum, if either of you want to start a thread for your languages, I would certainly follow them. I am terribly interested in both your languages.
  12. I loved српски, so much so when I learned how easy genitive plural is in Serbian!
  13. I studied Slovene years ago. Unfortunately, I started with the Teach Yourself, which was horrible.
  14. Parts of it are phonetic. I recommend highly the book Middle Egyptian by James P Allen.
  15. I studied Lakota for about a month years ago. Loved it. Would love to study it again someday.
  16. Be careful with the terms "perfect" and "imperfect." Those terms work in English (and some other languages) but the terms you should use in Russian is imperfective (aspect) and perfective (aspect). There are slight differences between Russian imperfective aspect and, say, French imperfect tense. And to be honest, the verb aspects of Russian are easier than verb tenses in many languages, especially in Romance languages IMHO. Good luck! If you are ready for a good motion verb book, I can highly recommend Russian Motion Verbs for Intermediate Students by William Mahota. Cheers
  17. Oh jeez, pronunciation is not the problem. People and teachers who worry over the difference between и and ы or ш and щ are doing themselves/a disservice. In the 20+ years I've studied/used this language, I've never had a Russian speaker get confused because I pronounced ы like и. Now use the wrong motion verb, and that can lead to confusion. Motion verbs are the bane of my (Russian studying) existence. I've even been forgiven for using the wrong case or at least the wrong endings on nouns. Again, if the Russian speaker understands you despite you messing up the genitive plural for искусство, what's it matter? (I'm of course talking about using the language versus being tested in it.) Meanwhile, I'll go study some more. (See how I just used go and didn't worry about the mode of transport or the aspect of the verb? Проклятые русские глаголы движения!)
  18. My кот gets very upset when people call him кошка.
  19. English and Spanish are similar like Russian and Icelandic.
  20. I had an instructor years ago, to whom I was complaining about not getting enough listening practice. He told me to read more. WTF? Sure enough, we did the same amount of listening weekly as usual, but I added a lot more reading on my "off" time. And who would have thought it, but I scored the same ILR level in listening as I did in reading! Not saying that's the best way, but it sure worked for me.
  21. If you're going to write your new words in a notebook, may I advise that you write the word AND the sentence you saw it in? That's gives you some context when you go to your vocabulary notebook and study. Something I like to do in Russian with new words is to find the root the word comes from, and then find other words with that same root. For instance, заявка "application" (one of many meanings) and some other words using the same root: заява "denunciation" заявитель "bidder" "applicant" заявить "to apply"
  22. I uses as many different resources as possible. For Russian, I am lucky enough to live in a Russophone dominant area, so I speak as often as possible with locals. I also have a pretty good library of Russian books, so I'll read them as well. Add to that online Russian news, and I've got my reading taken care of. Listening and speaking are covered with my fellow interlocutors and my 120 channels of (mostly) Russian television. For Esperanto, I use Duolingo to "mop up" the parts I missed as I was teaching myself over the years, and many Esperanto books and periodicals for "real" reading. For listening, I love Pola Ret-radio newscasts. I listen to those several times a week. I'm moving soon to Moscow and as there is an Esperanto club there, I intend on going to some meetings so I can finally speak Esperanto, in person, with other speakers! For all other languages, I use whatever I can find. When I studied Cornish, for instance, I used a great course called KDL (Kernewek dre Lyther...highly recommended) and a teacher. I got some kids books to supplement and listened to some news that was translated to Cornish.
  23. My wife and I both know Russian at B2-C1. But we decided that wasn't good enough to "raise" our kids in Russian. The first year of my first son's life I spoke to him in Esperanto as much as possible, and he happens to be good at languages (picked up Spanish quickly and his Russian isn't bad). Not sure if his language abilities are from that Esperanto experience, but who knows? We homeschooled our kids for a while, and my wife let the kids play RuneScape for an hour per school day, as long as they played in the German world. Sure enough, after a few months, my boys (then 8 and 10) were arguing amongst themselves over the difference between axe and hatchet in German. We have lived overseas and put our kids in international schools, but sadly (?) English-medium schools. They each got Russian in school and can all read it pretty well, but still probably at a A2 maybe B1 level. Still, better than not.
  24. I've written about this elsewhere I think, but here it is again. Most linguists/language geeks I know will study their flash cards diligently, but mostly from their L2 to their native language. Well,that helps in listening and reading, but not so much in speaking. Your brain is putting together what it wants to say, then translates it into the L2. So...what you should do is flip those flashcards around and study your native language to the L2. Sure that's harder, but it is how your brain is working when you're trying to speak your L2. Also, and this is important: relax. I used to worry so much about my Russian. Did I say that in the right case? Did I use the proper motion verb? Finally, I just gave up and spoke. I figured if my interlocutor didn't understand me, they'd ask me to clarify. Sure enough, my speaking improved.
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