Pretty productive day….

OK, the last few days I have been reviewing anki for over an hour a day. It turned out though that most of my anki was Mongolian, and the one deck with Uyghur cards had messed up fonts. So today I spent several hours(most of the afternoon really) putting in sentences from a script for a Uyghur movie. I did 106 sentences so I am quite happy. Now I am hoping to cut up the sound track I have for the movie and hopefully John and Joel can help me add the audio to anki. At least I’ll have some Uyghur anki to work with!

Wednesday November 16

After weeks of not doing Anki, I finally got down to it and reviewed about 600 cards  of mostly Mongolian words. Now I am back to having regular review which should be a lot more manageable. I do have to spend time though putting in more vocabulary and sentences, esp. for Uyghur, but for Mongolian as well.

This morning I also watched 15-20 minutes of Chinese programming on tv, something else I did not do in ages. Is this spurt going to last longer than one or two days?

Not much progress…..

Another post to report no progress and just muddling in things  I have been getting a lot of materials, in Mongolian as well as in Tibetan, Tuvan, Yugur and others. And Daniel send me a link for 29 Kazakh video clips which seem really nice and almost induce me to start with Kazakh again. But in my main languages, the ones I really want to focus on right now, Mongolian and Uyghur, I have not done much studying.

For Uyghur I have been doing a fair amount of listening though, as I have a cd in the car and have been trying to listen to it when we drive around. And I feel I might be at the point that I could transcribe it. So that is one bright point.

I also found a wonderful intermediate Mongolian book and waiting for it to come in with inter-library loan. I have some audio for that already, so that should be fun to work with. And we found a wonderful online course: 80 lessons of Basic Mongolian and 80 lessons of Intermediate Mongolian. John really likes this course and has been working on it several hours a day and I too want to peruse it more.

As far as Chinese tv goes there is not much to report. I get to put it on maybe a couple times a week, but I guess it at least is something.

OK, this is just an update. Am really wanting to spend some very concentrated time on language, but it just is not happening. Cooking, shopping, schooling etc. take up a lot of time and besides that it has been quite stressful here in the house, which does not help me to study. And being woken up almost every night does not help either. But…….I will keep plodding on.

In the States

We have been here in California for about a month now. Living situation is not conducive to much language learning, but am slowly getting back into it anyways.

I found out that we have several Chinese tv channels, so when my mother -in-law is not in the room I try to watch some. Am hoping to watch 30 minutes a day, either movies or news.

I have also started putting sentences from my Uyghur Reader in anki. I am typing out the Uyghur, copying out the English and now have to cut up the audio files to add audio to the cards. It is so relaxing to work on language study!

Last week we watched a movie that I have wanted to watch for a long time. It is in Uyghur with English subtitles so I am typing out the subtitles and am hoping Lloyd will be able to get the audio for me by recording it as it is playing on the computer. Then I will have to cut that up as well and add it to the anki cards.

Have not done much with Mongolian, but want to continue with the anki I have for that and eventually start adding sentences with audio from the miscellaneous readings I have. Unfortunately I still have no access to my computer, so everything I do is on stolen minutes on Lloyd’s computer when he is doing other things.

Beijiing…..

Have been in Beijing for over a week now, but it still has been hard getting language study in. We usually are out quite a few hours a day, walking around, checking things out, finding places to eat. So I do get exposure, but studying has been hard. Our current hotel room is not very conducive to studying as there is no place to sit,  books are packed up and my computer is not working. But the last couple days I have been staying in our hotel room as I have a bad head cold and yesterday Lloyd and I surfed the internet and found some very helpful Chinese podcasts. So today I am downloading them and am planning to listen to those while lying in bed. You can’t really call it studying, but at least I get some listening in.

Earlier this week I also listened to about 3 hours of Uyghur, which was very, very nice. I am hoping that soon I can start working with the Uyghur Reader I found and do one or two lessons per week out of that.

And I have not given up on Mongolian. I have not been working with the textbook, but Indiana University has some neat video clips up, so I hope to listen to one of those a few times each day and work with the material they have online in the intermediate reading section.

We’ll see how much longer we still are in Beijing and how much I will get done. But hopefully today will be a good day.

 

Major upheavals – but trying to get back in the swing of things…

It has been so long since I posted something that I even forgot my password. Fortunately I did more language study than that, although I must confess this last month has been a lost cause. I kept my promise that I would not do any other language except Mongolian till July 1, but I unfortunately ceased doing Mongolian as well. I have a good excuse….deciding to move to the States meant I had to pack up, pare down , and clean, but still………

Well,  July 1 has come and gone. We moved out of our house and will take the train to China in a few days. So what does that mean for language study?

Being in Beijing should be a good reason for starting up Chinese again, so I am hoping to listen to all 3 Pimsleur courses of Mandarin in the next few weeks, at least half an hour to 45 minutes a day.. I do want to work on the other languages too though, so plan on listening for a minimum of half an hour to each of the other languages I am focussing on: Mongolian, Kazakh and Uyghur. For Uyghur and Mongolian I also need to focus on reading and put sentences in Anki.

There is one new language I want to start working with, and that is Tuvan. I’ll probably try to locate more material in Tuvan in the next month and then start working on it in a low key fashion.

I am looking forward to finally getting back in a study mode. I’ll try and do better updating this blog but if I actually get language study done I’ll probably be more motivated to also blog about it

 

P.S. Just realized that all these lofty goals are dependent on my computer working and at this point it isn’t. Oh well……

Plodding along……..

Well, have tried to post something on the blog for several days already. However, out internet is so atrocious that I will write something in a text document and then copy it out in my blog.

Haven’t posted for two weeks. Haven’t really been very excited about how language study has gone either, and have been quite discouraged, which does not help. Need to find new ways that work.

I have been keeping up with anki, sometimes doing an hour and a few times managing to get in more, but it was getting quite boring. So I have decided to drop the big “Mongolian” file and only work on Bayarmaa and Hongerzol, just to get smaller chunks that will get done quicker. I have also worked on adding the rest of Bayarmaa in – from chapter 7 till chapter 35. Only 15 more chapters to go and I might try to get all of it done this weekend.

After I am done putting Bayarmaa in anki I hope to start working on Rita Kullmann’s grammar book and “mine” that for sentences.

Instead of having the Mongolian anki file, I decided to listen about an hour a day minimum to the audio for Colloquial Mongolian by Alan Sanders. It reminds me of Pimsleur and is nice listening to – hopefully it will be more engaging then doing those phrases in anki.

Daniel got me a Mongolian New Testament, so most days I now read a chapter a day in that. I don’t get very much yet, but as I do the same chapter that I read in English I do get some and it seems to be improving.

One other thing I did this week was looking at Mongolian movies. I found a site, http://www.ineehuu.com/, where you can watch the movies online, so I chose some to preview and hope to be able to work some with that, internet permitting. And I went to youtube and located the video clips there from the Eagle tv programs on the Changed Life center, and Hannah’s orphanage and also Ganbat’s testimony. They are not so easy to follow as it is more a report not dialogue, but still.

My last find was an evangelistic movie in Mongolian that was quite good. The acting is maybe a bit stilted, but it seems perfect for language learning. This site actually has movies in quite a few different languages, so I downloaded some of the other ones as well for when I get to switch to Uyghur or Mandarin again. The site is http://www.indigitech.net/ and it is quite neat.

I really need to get more listening in, so have turned on the radio to a Mongolian talk station when I am working in the kitchen. I am not getting much, but I guess every little bit helps.