Following up on last Thursday's article about studying in coffee shops as my retirement is now in its second week, I'm still looking for "The Place" to set up my studying. Still, so far I've managed to cover my daily goals, mixing reading, studying foreign languages and, of course, writing for this blog. I'm finding myself usually spreading it all out over the course of the day at home, although here my attention span isn't quite as strong and I'm more likely to be distracted as opposed to be sitting somewhere in a public place. I've been diligent with the language study, continuing as I earlier stated with taking a few sentences from a specified article and writing each of them down, taking turns in Spanish, German, Russian and Chinese according to the Google translations. Since unfamiliar Chinese characters can be problematic since their pronunciation isn't readily apparent, I have begun using ChapGPT to provide transliteration of my articles into the Pinyin Romanization writing system, which I print out and use. Since I am at intermediate "Level B" stages in all four languages, I still have quite a task in front of me with thousands of words in each to internalize before I can more comfortably understand them...and with listening comprehension consistently lagging behind the reading (I also daily listen to radio/podcasts in each of the four). But more than anything I enjoy the process of learning: it's fun!
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Do you ever get your languages mixed up, like saying "La frau or die mujer?
ReplyDeleteAlways. I'm creating little directional areas in my mind of the different languages just to keep myself focused on the right one. Left/West is Chinese, Right/East is Russian, Up/North is German and Down/South is Spanish. So, say I'm trying to come up with something in Spanish...I mentally "put" myself into the Down/South "zone". I don't know how effective in the end this strategy will be, but hopefully I'll be able to keep them reasonably separated instead of a linguistic stew.
ReplyDeleteWhat an interesting concept. Since (I think) the left side of your brain is where you retrieve information and the right side is where you make things up, I wonder if your Chinese will get easier and your Russian will have an issue with you inadvertently making up incorrect spelling or words.
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