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19.09. 2022 - 25.09.2022

I’m still struggling to find the motivation to sit still for longer than half an hour. Which I need to improve or I’m never going to finish this final project.

On the bright side, the professor approved my proposal, which means I’m cleared to start working on it asap. As soon as I find enough motivation 🙄.

I still can’t believe how much happened this past weeks. My life changed drastically so quick, it’s insane.

// tips for being an a* student

If you’re looking to practice a bit and remember your target language better… here are tons of free worksheets/workbooks for 34 languages (Japanese, Spanish, Korean, French, German, Italian, etc, etc.)

It’s the same type of “fill in the blank” workbook across all of their languages but the magic in actually rewriting things over and over is that the words end up sticking. Plus, there are English sections where you’ll have to force yourself to remember and write the word/phrase in the target language - which is even better for your memory (called active recall - forcing yourself to remember).  I’m personally a big fan of this approach and I’d do similar to pass vocab quizzes in my HS & uni language classes.

If you’re interested, give these a go.

Afrikaans— https://www.afrikaanspod101.com/Afrikaans-worksheets

Arabic— https://www.arabicpod101.com/Arabic-worksheets

Bulgarian— https://www.bulgarianpod101.com/Bulgarian-worksheets

Cantonese— https://www.cantoneseclass101.com/Cantonese-worksheets

Chinese— https://www.chineseclass101.com/Chinese-worksheets

Czech— https://www.czechclass101.com/Czech-worksheets

Danish— https://www.danishclass101.com/Danish-worksheets

Dutch— https://www.dutchpod101.com/Dutch-worksheets

English— https://www.englishclass101.com/English-worksheets

Filipino— https://www.filipinopod101.com/Filipino-worksheets

Finnish— https://www.finnishpod101.com/Finnish-worksheets

French— https://www.frenchpod101.com/French-worksheets

German—https://www.germanpod101.com/German-worksheets

Greek— https://www.greekpod101.com/Greek-worksheets

Hebrew— https://www.hebrewpod101.com/Hebrew-worksheets

Hindi— https://www.hindipod101.com/Hindi-worksheets

Hungarian— https://www.hungarianpod101.com/Hungarian-worksheets

Indonesian— https://www.indonesianpod101.com/Indonesian-worksheets

Italian— https://www.italianpod101.com/Italian-worksheets

Japanese— https://www.japanesepod101.com/Japanese-worksheets

Korean— https://www.koreanclass101.com/Korean-worksheets

Norwegian— https://www.norwegianclass101.com/Norwegian-worksheets

Persian— https://www.persianpod101.com/Persian-worksheets

Polish— https://www.polishpod101.com/Polish-worksheets

Portuguese— https://www.portuguesepod101.com/Portuguese-worksheets

Romanian— https://www.romanianpod101.com/Romanian-worksheets

Russian— https://www.russianpod101.com/Russian-worksheets

Spanish— https://www.spanishpod101.com/Spanish-worksheets

Swahili— https://www.swahilipod101.com/Swahili-worksheets

Swedish— https://www.swedishpod101.com/Swedish-worksheets

Thai— https://www.thaipod101.com/Thai-worksheets

Turkish— https://www.turkishclass101.com/Turkish-worksheets

Urdu— https://www.urdupod101.com/Urdu-worksheets

07.01.2022

28|10|2021

🍂 Day 28 of My Autumn Studying Challenge 🍂

28th October - Haunted house or Halloween party?

Linguistic structure

Phonetics and phonology

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies the sounds of human speech. It also includes sign languages, as it studies the gestural and visual composition of signs.

Phonetics is concerned with the physical production, transmission, and perception of sounds. Phonology, on the other hand, deals with the patterning of sounds within a language. Here, the phoneme is of crucial importance. Phonemes are perceptual units that are the building blocks of the (spoken or signed) words of a language.

Transcription

Phonetic transcription is a way of representing the sounds that occur in human languages independently of the way they are written. The most widely known system is the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), mostly based on the Latin alphabet, which is able to transcribe features of speech such as consonants, vowels, and suprasegmental features. It is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech-language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.

Relation between phones and phonemes

The phone is the basic unit of sound for human speech, while the phoneme is the basic unit of sound for specific languages. A phoneme is an abstract unit for a given language and will include a number of different phones. This is reflected in different levels of transcription. The purpose of phonetic transcription (usually in square brackets) is to transcribe sounds (phones) so that the exact articulation is recorded, whereas phonemic transcription (usually in slashes) transcribes the words in terms of how sounds are categorized in a given language. The border between phonemic and phonetic transcription is not always clear—narrow phonetic transcription captures more variations in sounds while broad phonetic transcription captures only the most noticeable features and blends into phonemic transcription.

Here’s a list of what I do that really helps me learn the language using Duolingo; it’s extra work than the app gives you, but it helps me get my answers right most of the time and I feel like I know the language much better than I would have normally.

Completing the tree

The first thing you should do is complete the tree! Most people think they stop using Duolingo after that - this is absolutely not the stopping point! There’s a reason I listed this as step one.

To complete the tree, set a goal for yourself. One lesson per day, one unit per week, etc. Experiment a little and find one that works for you.

The XP feature on Duolingo helps me stay on track by measuring my frequency, not my learning. Use this to make you motivated to start each day, but don’t use it as a measure of how well you’re doing. It’s like a homework grade that gives points for completion but not accuracy. But, because of this, you can choose any goal you want. I’m on the “insane” goal (50pts per day) but I often go way past the limit. Trust me, if you’re following these steps, that won’t be a problem.

THIS IS AN IMPORTANT RULE!!!! Before ever starting a new lesson, all of your previous lessons must be golden.

Duolingo builds off of previous skills in a fairly linear way. You’ll notice especially as you get farther in the tree that whenever you learn new nouns, they will always be practiced in the context of the most recent verb tense you’ve learned, and they will always mix up adjectives and phrases that you’ve also recently learned. Because of this, if you’re even a little shaky on a previous lesson, you’re screwing yourself over if you don’t review that first.

When you first open Duolingo, use “Practice Weak Skills” - this will give you a random lesson to run through and practice, and often it will mix multiple to allow you to strengthen multiple skills at once.

Keep using “Practice Weak Skills” until every lesson is golden. This takes about 3-4 times if you get most of the questions right, 5-6 if you’re getting most of them wrong - and it will get you past your XP goal. When you’re done, scroll through to check that every lesson is golden. Feels nice, don’t it?

Your lesson strength deteriorates quickly. It often feels like you’re taking one step forwards and two steps back. This is the case for a short while - the more you practice, the longer your skills will stick there. When you need to strengthen them again, all you have to do is prove that you know it from before. Instead of 15 questions on the same lesson, you’ll get about 3 - if you get all of them right, the skill goes straight back up to golden!

HOWEVER:

If you are having trouble with a certain lesson, maybe you find yourself constantly tripping up on it? Practice these lessons individually.

I constantly mess up on verbs, and now that I’ve finished the tree, whenever I review it mixes up to 4 tenses at once. What happens then? I get mixed up.

Personally, I rushed through the tree when I shouldn’t have. Whoops.

Because of this, I review each verb lesson on its own before using “Practice Weak Skills.”

When I feel confident enough, the next day I might test myself using “Practice Weak Skills” and see how it turns out. It’s your personal judgement call on when you should stop isolating lessons!

Grammar time!

So, if you’re anything like me, you love learning languages. If you’re even more like me, you have a preference for doing it, and it is not memorizing vocab (though this is necessary!). Duolingo is nice for vocab and grammar….practice. To practice, you have to learn it first, right? It teaches you the vocab well, but there’s one huge problem I found while finishing up my Spanish tree: The farther you get, the less grammar lessons there are.

This is crucial! How am I supposed to know what’s going one with he/habia/habias when I don’t even know what the tense is?

So, I prepared a list of grammar resources/courses that I think do a good job of walking you through, step-by-step, the lessons in a similar order to Duolingo.

My recommendation for using these requires looking ahead. Look at your next Duolingo lesson and, before taking it, look at the corresponding lesson on one of these websites. Take notes on it! Go back to Duolingo and now that you actually know what you’re doing. (If you get things consistently wrong, you can then review the grammar lesson on whatever website - in case they’re out of order). These apply to any website or program other than Duolingo, especially self-teaching, since they’re all basic grammar lessons.

The ones I’ve listed are mainly Spanish and German; these are the languages I’m studying. I can’t speak on other websites and their ease/comprehensiveness if I’m not studying that language! Please feel free to edit this post and add your own websites/languages when you reblog.

Spanish

StudySpanish.com (This is my personal favourite! Separated into units that progress from basic to advanced.)

SpanishDict.com (good for referencing what you got wrong. Organizes by subject of lesson rather than easy-hard)

Bowdoin (Another one that goes through basic-advanced. Has lessons written in Spanish and exercises to practice! Also has more information than most of these other links, however this can be confusing and that’s why it’s not my favourite.)

German

German-Grammar.de (Has a TON of information and exercises; can be hard to navigate.)

Dartmouth Review (A little chart to separate very broad categories; once you pick a section, it goes on for a while.)

Deutsch Lingolia (Left column has a list; the top part is the important tenses, nouns, etc. grammar stuff.)

All Languages

ielanguages (Contains French, Spanish, ESL, Italian, German, Swedish, and Dutch, with a little information about various non-European languages.)

Rocket Languages (Another good reference. Ads pop up, but you don’t need to pay in order to read the free coursework. On each of these pages there should be a blue column on the right listing grammar lessons. Good luck!)

Spanish

Portuguese

Korean

Japanese

Italian

Hindi

German

French

Chinese