Reinhard Krenn's blog

Flowers in the garden

On May 18 early morning frost, the latest in 70 years in the low-lying regions of Lower Austria, destroyed tomato and bean plants in the gardens, corn shoots, squash and sunflowers in the fields, even young fir trees (Christmas trees) and vineyards suffered losses. Temperatures have behaved in a chaotic way this year again. Drought, 30 degrees C, frost, 30 degrees again, I wouldn't dare to predict the weather for this summer. A wet July or a long hot summer, anything can happen. Gardening will still be rewarding, but hard work.

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Encuentro español

En mi colegio los alumnos del último año están preparando la selectividad de español con un "encuentro español", unos días de trabajo práctico con un tutor español que visita nuestro colegio de vez en cuando para ofrecer la posibilidad de comunicarse de manera real.
Yo, como profesor de inglés y de francés no me es posible participar en este tipo de encuentros. Yo en cambio puedo utilizar los encuentros que ofrece la web LingQ con sus tutores nativos hispanohablantes.
El martes por la tarde, después de más de un año sin tener conversaciones en español, tuve la experiencia de hablar con Berta, una de las tutoras de LingQ, que ya conozco desde hace tiempo porque hemos participado en muchas discusiones de grupo en inglés. En español no habíamos hablado más que dos veces.
Al principio no me sentía muy bien. Aunque escucho y leo regularmente lecciones y podcasts en español, acostumbrándome al acento español de España, reteniendo vocabulario y estructuras, jamás he aprendido mucha gramática. Durante mi conversación, me convencí que he tenido bastante éxito con este método de aprendizaje, con mucha lectura y muchas horas de escucha pasiva. Si escuchas y lees mucho, tienes conversaciones internas en tu cerebro y así practicas el idioma sin necesidad de tener encuentros reales.
Le agradezco a Berta que me ayude en mis esfuerzos de practicar esta lengua fascinante que es el español. No prefiero las lenguas latinas a las otras, pero sí tienen un lugar importante en mi universo lingüístico. Por eso seguiré teniendo otros encuentros para practicar mi español.

(corregido por Berta, tutora de LingQ)

Intensificar el aprendizaje de idiomas

Hoy tenía que corregir las pruebas de inglés que habían escrito los alumnos del segundo curso el martes pasado. Les costó mucho porque tuvieron que hacer tareas gramaticales así como producir textos. Para mi también es difícil progresar en los idiomas que aprendo.
Desde principios de año intento aprender cuatro idiomas de forma activa, sin contar el inglés y el francés. Quería ahondar en ruso, checo y español y sentar las bases del turco. Por eso estudio dos idiomas al día. Normalmente escucho al menos una hora por idioma, leo unos textos y estudio el vocabulario mediante tarjetas de vocabulario. De vez en cuando me apunto a una discusión para activar el vocabulario, además a veces escribo un texto como este. Sin embargo no es posible mantener el ritmo cada día.
Como dice Moses McCormick en sus vídeos, lo más importante en el aprendizaje de idiomas es la motivación. Es motivador poder comunicarse con nativos y otros en una lengua extranjera. Claro que hace falta mucho tiempo para entrenarse y hacer inmersión en un idioma. Pero lo mires por donde lo mires, es fascinante.

(Corregido por Berta de LingQ, 30.03.2012)

Spring as it should be...

Apricot tree in bloom in Krems, Lower Austria. The Wachau region along the Danube between Krems and Melk is famous for the local variety of apricots, the Wachauer Marille (die Marille, the Austrian German word for Aprikose).
The orange fruits have rosy cheeks and should be ripe in July, with a full aroma, to be eaten fresh, ideal for making jam, and locally used for making brandy and liqueur.

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Tutoring 300 LingQ conversations

The number of LingQ conversations I have hosted so far in about two and a half years may not be impressive compared to some English or French tutors' records, but it means having had a conversation as a tutor every three days on average. That's not bad. I haven't kept track of the number of conversations I have signed up for in various languages. Speaking has certainly kept me very busy over time.

When I started offering tutoring in German in August 2009 it took several weeks before anyone would sign up or send me writings. Thanks to Steve, who I spoke to a few times, and Vera, who cajoled some of her students into trying out a new tutor, I got to having a few more or less regular students. I even tried having group conversations very early on. And I liked the new experience.

The breakthrough happened when LingQ allowed members to tutor in multiple languages. The demand for English made it easier to find students who were interested in trying out speaking with a non-native speaker of English. As a language teacher I thought I had enough to offer to beginners to high intermediate students of English. As it turned out, the students who chose me as an English tutor were more interested in the communicative aspects and cultural learning of LingQ conversations than in the purely linguistic side of having their spoken language corrected.

As a full-time language teacher with a private life and a keen language learner myself, I cannot, of course, be available for more than a couple of conversations per week. Conversations are fun, interesting, a learning experience in which I participate. Every time I learn something about my mother tongue too. I know that German presents particular difficulties to students that mainly have to do with articles, cases, word order and phrases. However, communication is possible in spite of problems in these areas. Usually I can guess the intended meanings.

Lately I have also enjoyed tutoring in French, just a few conversations, but it works the same way as English. I have conversations in English and French myself with native speakers, you are never done with learning phrases and ways of saying things, how ever high your level may be. Speaking naturally requires endless practice and constant refining.

I think I owe my students a lot. Let me say thank you to everyone who has ever signed up for a conversation with me. LingQ truly is a worldwide community of language lovers.

Got cats...

This doesn't look like winter, does it?
Let's hope the 'real winter' won't be Siberian :)

Von meinem iPhone gesendet

I've been collecting languages, knowledge about languages and real language skills, all my life, it seems. In school I had to deal with 3 languages, so why not try learning a few more, I thought. I loved travelling, went to England at age 12 for the first time, to Hungary when I was 14, I knew about the advantages of being able to use a foreign language, even in a limited way. And I got to love the feeling of starting a new language, learning a new way of thinking and also the ways in which languages could express things in different or very similar ways. Even at university, where I studied English and French, I could not leave other languages alone. For very practical reasons I had to focus on 2 languages that I was going to teach in high school/college, but I always found my linguistic interests hard to control.

Now, with so many interesting languages available on LingQ, I have found that I can only improve my language skills if I focus on one language at a time. My ultimate goal is to be as comfortable in Russian as I'm in French, but since I'm not studying at university, I neither have the pressure nor the motivation to work as hard as it would be necessary to achieve that level. So I'm content with the progress I have already made (maybe from a good Beginner 2 to Intermediate 2 level) over almost four years.

Whenever I have learned other languages (Swedish, Spanish), I drifted away from Russian and progress came to a standstill. I don't want to risk this happening again. So whatever other language or languages I'm studying, they will have slower progress. Still, I could not do without learning other languages. The funny thing is that I keep finding words that have obviously come into Russian from other languages (Arabic, Turkish, German, French…) or I find similar patterns in other languages. Maybe it's the "language instinct" that is very strong in some people or some "bug" or something else. There's endless variation in languages like in people in general, it's a game I have always liked to play.

LingQ forum post: http://www.lingq.com/learn/en/forum/4/12622/

How many languages can one study?

LingQ enables you to learn more languages than any other way I have been using. But realistically, is it possible to have a full working life, even as a language teacher, and learn more than two languages at a time? My experience has been that you can't or at least that you can improve only marginally in languages that you don't study on a regular basis.

Of course, you do improve. Whenever you get back to a language you have put on hold for a time - I did that repeatedly with Russian in the past - it takes a while until you feel you are making progress again. But then it's as if you had been working, or rather your brain had been working all the time and your progress starts to pick up.

I hope it will be like that when I make a restart with Chinese and maybe Arabic. For the time being I'm trying to catch up on what is left of Czech, which I began studying when I was 15, after having done English and Latin at school and starting Italian along with it.

From my profile page on LingQ (http://www.lingq.com/profile/alleray/):

At LingQ I mainly study Russian and Czech now. And of course I read and listen to English and French content, practicing speaking as well. I’d love to improve my Spanish and Swedish, experience Latin as a 'spoken' language, and even dabble in Arabic, Chinese and Turkish, when it is offered on LingQ - the main problem is time, as for everybody else. So I stick to two languages most of the time with occasional flying visits to other languages. Languages I’m also interested in: Romanian, Greek, Hungarian, Serbo-Croatian, Albanian, Polish and last but not least Japanese.

According to my self-assessment (and the European Reference Framework for Languages) my current levels are:

Arabic: Beginner 2 - a widely spoken language that influenced many Asian and African languages, like Latin it was a lingua franca in the Middle Ages - the language of medicine and philosophy, so it has fascinated me for years
Chinese: Beginner 2 - currently put on hold, could make a fresh start any time
Czech: Beginner 2 (A2) - studied it long ago, catching up on the languages below; I’d like to get to Intermediate 1 speaking proficiency by next spring. I think it’s a realistic goal.
Italian: Out of practice but could become Intermediate 1 again relatively soon.
Swedish: Intermediate 1 (B1) - currently put on hold apart from an occasional article
Latin: Intermediate 1 - studied it for 6 years at Grammar school, it’s about time to brush up
Spanish: Intermediate 1 (B1+) - more free time and I’ll be at it again
Russian: Intermediate 2 (B2) - constant practice ensures more and more fluency, there’s just so much vocabulary, and it certainly IS a very difficult language; but I love it :)
French: Advanced 1 (C1+) - the language of the heart
English: Advanced 2 (C2) - the language of the mind

First frost

After a clear night, morning frost on the Japanese maple.

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New cat...

Yesterday we got our new tabby cat Minka from the animal shelter at Vösendorf to the south of Vienna, the headquarters of the Wiener Tierschutzverein. They are currently taking care of about 700 cats. We hope she will get along well with our two black cats. Seems to be quite relaxed about moving here ;)

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