Logging your hours of listening

There are lots of people that like to log their hours of listening and others that don't, I like to keep my statistics on LingQ updated, but seen as I do most of my listening away from the computer I always forget to do so. I have just got and ipod touch and therefore have been downloading a lot of language apps which allow me to listen and one of the things that I am now doing is listening and then just as I stop I check how long I have listened for and then write that number down on a post stick note that I have on my desk, when the numbers add up to 60 minutes I go on LingQ and add one hour onto my listening time.

Oman

Well I will be visiting my father for the next week and therefore won't be able to write anything on my blog, but fear not as I will be back in a week!!!

Books or Internet?

I want to hear some opinions about this haha, what do you think is best????
I personally love both, I often use books to gain a good foundation: basic vocab, grammar etc and then I use the Internet for practise finding podcasts and boosting my vocab.

Let me know your opinion?

I spoke Swedish!!!!!!!

Hello,
Today I had my first conversation in Swedish and it was actually quite fun. I have only really studied Swedish for about 15 hours and so I was quite happy with how it went. The conversation lasted 15 minutes and we spoke a little bit about which languages we speak, what is hard in the languages we speak and things like that. After that we translated a text from English to Swedish and that was also really helpful. I really enjoyed speaking Swedish and plan on having a few conversations a month from now on.

Speak to you soon,
Harry

Min Svenska

Kan du har konversationer på svenska????

Jag har just börjat ha konversationer på svenska och det är inte så lätt, eftersom jag inte kan förstå infödda. Jag kan tala svenska och jag kan uttrycka mine idéer på svenska om språkinlärning och andra grundllägande ämnen, men jag kan inte förstå infödda, eftersom den svenska accenten är mycket svår. I framtiden behöver jag lyssna mer för att förbättre min hörförståelse.

Un poco sobre mi español

Hola a todos, hoy decidí que hablaría en español. Nunca he escrito en este Blog en otro idioma, y por tanto hoy decidí que tenía que intentar. Empecé a estudiar español el año pasado en julio y en los ultimos seis meses he logrado a un nivel intermedio uno. Puedo hablar sobre casí cada de los temas basicos y también puedo expresarme bastante bueno cuando estoy hablando sobre temas más avanzados, como la sistema politica aquí en Inglaterra o sobre los medios.
También mis tutores me han dicho que mi acento es bastante bueno y que hablo muy rapidó para un estudiante. Me gusta mucho este idioma y este año estoy intentando lograr a un nivel intermedio dos o quiza avanzado uno. Creo que voy a ser capaz de hablar sobre casí cada tema en diez meses. Ya veremos.
Eso es todo, escribiré más en otro idioma mañana, quizas alemán o chino o sueca. ¡Ya veremos!

¡Hasta la proximá!

My new mandarin schedule

I now plan on studying spoken mandarin and not learning any characters. I am going to learn the characters in the summer and that way I will know both, but I figured that I can reach a decent level in conversational mandarin after a few months of daily study. I will also be working with a tutor from China once a week and we will be translating some texts together and working on learning as much pinyin as possible.
Current text that I am trying to translate:
Hello, my name is Harry Ness and my hobbies are language learning and ping pong. I study languages for at least one hour per day. My current goal is to learn to speak Mandarin. I am learning a lot of pinyin and I am finding it challenging. I find it hard, because Mandarin is not like normal European languages.
I know, it looks quite advanced for a few days worth of studying, but I am sure that I will be able to write it on my blog in pinyin in no time at all.

:) :) :) :) :)

Time management

Time management is one of the most important things when it comes to language learning. You need to be able to manage your time in order to make sure that you study for at least an hour a day.
Is there just one way of doing this????
No, there are so many different ways of doing this. Some people are really strict with themselves (me) and like to plan exactly when they want to study and this is fine. However other people like to just have a goal of studying one hour within a three hour period e.g A person has three hours in which they want to do one hour of study. They don't care exactly when they do it, but know that they have to do it within that time. Then there are the people that really don't have any form of routine. They just study when they like and really don't mind if they miss a day, they usually do the same amount of study as everyone else, but have no particular routine, perhaps just a weekly routine or maybe even monthly goals that they know they have to work towards throughout the month.

It really is important that you are able to manage your time. If you can't then it's hard to achieve similar results to those who can. I have achieved an intermediate level in Spanish after 6 months, due to my daily routine and the fact that I am really strict with myself. But I know that there are other people that have no routine and have achieved a similar level in Spanish in the same time.

It doesn't matter what kind of person you are, as long as you're able to make sure that you do a certain amount every day/week/month.

See you tomorrow, Harry.

My new course

Recently I have been following a new course that I believe can take me to advanced 1 in my languages. To start the course you need to have an intermediate 1 kind of level, but you can start from intermediate 2 or anywhere inbetween intermediate 1 and advanced 1.

What the course contains:

• A list of things that I need to be able to do at each level.
• A rough guidline to how high my vocabulary count needs to be.
• Which topics I need to be able to discuss.
• The method.

Since I haven't really finished it yet I am not going to write the course out on here, but I will do sometime in the future. But I have made a rough guestimate that it is going to take about 12 months to finish the course, after twelth months of around 1 hour a day I feel that I will get to at least a high intermediate 2 level, if not advanced 1.

That's all for now, but I will write more soon.

The importance of Grammar

I know what your thinking, not another discussing on grammar, but it should make for an interesting post. Contrary to what some of you may believe, grammar doesn't need to be studied for more than 5 hours. However in my opinion you will never reach a native level in a language if you do not study grammar for at least 30 minutes a week.
Does that mean sitting down with a grammar book and working through exercises???
No of course not, there are so many ways to study grammar.
Are there any interesting ways to study grammar???
In my opinion studying grammar is never going to be interesting, but there are some ways to make it more fun:
1. Have a native speaker correct your writing on Lang8, sure you still have to study grammar, but your not studying it through books or doing exercises, your just learning from your mistakes.
2. Have a native speaker note down some of your corrections whilst your speaking to them and then talk to them about what you said wrong (in the foreign language if your level is good enough)
To sum up I really feel that when you start a language you should start by learning the basic rules of grammar, I did it in Spanish. My first 10 hours of study were "grammar hours" and obviously I picked up words through it, even if it was only fifty, and since then, over the past six months I have probably only done 5 hours of grammar, just studying my writing reports and conversation reports, it's great. Really all that you need to know is that grammar isn't the most important thing, but can still be fun and is necessary if you want to reach that native level of fluency :)

Leave a comment below to let me know what you think :)

Let's get strict

From now on I have to get strict with my languages learning. I really have to get serious and make sure that I am doing at least an hour a day of German and Spanish and therefore I decided that from now on I will put a timer on my computer that will count down from 1 hour. When it goes off I can choose to keep studying or to stop, but the important thing is that I do 1 hour a day of both, otherwise there is no chance of me reaching intermediate 2 in both by the end of the year. Just a quick post today, see you tomorrow :)

Sad news

Sadly everyone I have to stop my Mandarin challenge before I have even started it.

Why????

Well I have a ton of exams soon and I still need to do a little Spanish and German in order to keep going with them.

Are you ever going to get serious with Mandarin???

Yes I will be doing, starting this Summer I am going to go Mandarin crazy haha. All in good time, but I can almost guarantee you that I will be speaking Mandarin by the end of Summer, I mean it's going to be around a few hours study a day and at least this way I will have time to get a study plan set up. I really want to get serious with my Mandarin as I know it's becoming more and more popular and I just love the way it sounds.

Your new Mandarin plan????

Well the plan now is to be able to have a small Mandarin conversation by the end of Summer, at the end of Summer I am going to start having weekly conversations/lessons with LingQ tutors and I am really looking forward to seeing how far I get in over the 6 week summer holidays.

Does this mean that you won't be writing on your blog anymore???

No I will still be writing on my blog, in fact I will be trying to write on it as much as possible, though I will probably be writing more in my different languages in the future.

That's all for now, speak to you soon, Harry.

Mandarin challenge day 1

Ok guys, today is the first day of the Mandarin challenge and I have my ten characters, today I will be learning the following:
学习，尝试，汉语，大家好，来到，明白， 但，爱人，一点，and 欢迎
Feel free to immitate my challenge by learning the ones I do everyday. Throughout the hour of daily study I will be trying to use them a lot in sentences, for example.
我学习汉语。
我不明白。
The more characters I learn the better the sentences will get and who knows, maybe I will every start writing my blog in Mandarin soon.

My Mandarin challenge

I think it's time that I get serious with Mandarin, I also have to get serious with Swedish at some point, but for now I think i will go with Mandarin. I am just going to do an hour a day and then I hope to be able to have some form of basic conversation in Mandarin by perhaps some time in March or April, who knows whether I will stick to it, the main thing is that I go for it. I want to learn something like 10 characters a day in the first month and gradually things will get easier, I also have a 5 minute long conversation on language learning that I want to work through. There are 160 new characters in it and the goal is to be able to understand it all by the end of February, at least when I am reading it. So the overall mission statement is:
Be able to comprehend the 5 minute dialogue through reading the characters by the end of the month.
I will keep you posted, at the moment I can understand the first 20 - 30 seconds of it :)

New update

hello everyone, I realise that it has been a long time since I have written on my blog and oh my have things changed. I am going to write some posts in my languages in the future so that you can see what level I am at. My German is now at a comfortable intermediate level and so is my Spanish!!! I scrapped Czech and started with Swedish and now have a nice beginner level, and then there's Chinese, I have only just started studying it again and so I still have the poor beginner level, but I am having a lesson every week with a tutor on LingQ and by the end of the year I am sure that I will be able to have a little conversation.