ALTVM VIDETVR

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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Nov 24, 2016 9:43 pm

@Soffía Wow, thanks for the link, that's quite a collection of resources! I think I'll try sticking with Gordon for now, but if it becomes too impenetrable I'll see what else I can read over there.
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Soffía
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Soffía » Sat Nov 26, 2016 3:12 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:@Soffía Wow, thanks for the link, that's quite a collection of resources! I think I'll try sticking with Gordon for now, but if it becomes too impenetrable I'll see what else I can read over there.


You're welcome! The course is only in three volumes - textbook, readings and dictionary (IIRC) but there's obviously a lot of other content on that page. :)
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sat Nov 26, 2016 6:50 pm

This time I'm writing an early report, as I'll be spending the whole of next week on a business trip and will likely be preparing for that all of tomorrow night. Of course, there isn't really not much to report since Wednesday, especially since Thursday and Friday ended up being really busy and exhausting. I did manage to start on the European Portuguese GLOSS lessons, whose number seems to have increased from six to seven while I wasn't looking (for some reason, nearly all of the lessons' topics have to do with Angola). I've changed my source for the Latin readings of Caesar's Gallic War, as it turned out that the Dickinson College site only had a fraction of the chapters annotated. I've now switched to the version in Tufts University's Perseus Digital Library. And I've also recently tried reading an article in Spanish out loud, just to see if my learning Portuguese has affected it in any way. I haven't really studied Spanish, but I do believe that my Castilian Spanish pronunciation is passable, and I was afraid that Portuguese would mess up my s's and z's. Instead, it's the r-sounds that ended up suffering. It's always been difficult for me to consistently distinguish between /ɾ/ and /r/, so the comparatively more distinct Portuguese /ʁ/ stuck in no time. Unfortunately, I'm now tempted to use it instead of the Spanish /r/ whenever it comes up.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Dec 11, 2016 10:52 pm

Didn't manage to update last week, but I barely had any time to study that week anyway. I've largely returned to my routine by now. The biggest news over these two weeks I guess is that I'm done with the reading materials from the Old Church Slavonic book. I'm also one GLOSS lesson away from being done with European Portuguese for the time being. Arabic has been going slower than I intended it to, but I should be able to catch up next week.

I've also decided to cut down on some Anki decks, as the reviews have started consuming way too much time. I've decided to suspend all the cards in the Hakka and Manchu decks, since A) my results for them aren't that great, B) I can't really dedicate the time to improving them at the moment, and C) the chances of me seriously picking them back up at a later point are pretty low, given the paucity of media and low likelyhood of interacting with native speakers. It was an especially difficult decision with regard to Manchu, since this will inevitably mean that my ability to make out the script will deteriorate, but it's not like I ever really got much better at it than slow deciphering anyway. Maybe I can someday refresh my memory of it by learning to read in the closely related Mongolian script - that one at least has some modern-day online media (might not display properly on some browsers).
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Thu Jan 05, 2017 5:36 pm

Happy belated New Year to everyone!

I haven't written anything here is almost a month! The last couple of weeks of the year ended up unexpectedly busy at work, so I barely had any time or strength left to do language-learning-related activities, and just when I thought I'd be able to resume I ended up coming down with a bad fever right after midnight of New Year's Eve. Now that I've mostly recovered I guess I can update a little.

First of all, I have to confess having yet again given in to the sin of uncontrolled wanderlust: while gift-shopping in a bookstore I noticed that there was a new Ilya Frank Irish reader on sale. Flipping through it I saw that it included a large appendix with important linguistic and cultural information, including a detailed guide to Irish orthography and phonology (mainly focusing on the southern dialects of county Kerry, but noting important features of other dialects and the written standard), and I immediately decided to buy it, my existing challenge schedule be damned. I decided to just go through the appendix and learn how to sound out the words for now, add just enough words and sentences to Anki to cover most patterns and notable exceptions and get back to the actual reader at a later point (and as it turned out, most of the contents of the appendix were actually available online for free - that'll teach me to impulse-buy :D ). Having covered about 2/3 of it by now, there are still many things I don't understand or haven't fully memorized, but the orthography definitely doesn't seem as intimidating as it used to.

Another change to my current list of languages is that I've replaced Polish with Slovak. The reason for that is simple: I'm still not entirely sure if it will be doable (should become clearer in the next week or so), but I might be able to make it to the Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava this year. Hopefully I'll be able to complete a couple of courses on slovake.eu before the end of May so that I may be able to get by there on more than cognate discounts and guesswork.

As for my actual challenge, I've decided to simplify my Arabic Anki cards and have the sentences with vowel marks on the front. While learning to read MSA as it is written in everyday contexts would be nice, it's a bit outside of the scope of my challenge, and the reviews have already started piling up, so it's probably more reasonable not to create more difficulties than what the course I'm doing demands. I'm currently on lesson 25 of the 89 available, and considering that I might not be able to do these lessons every day this may take a while. Still, I'm enjoying this challenge and intend to continue doing it this year too, even if I do have to keep optimizing my Anki decks.

And as a postscript, here's my top 10 list of 2016 anime, including the few movies I've managed to catch (really can't wait to see 君の名は。 and 聲の形, but still no sign of them around here so far).

10. 灰と幻想のグリムガル
9. コンクリート・レボルティオ〜超人幻想〜THE LAST SONG
8. ふらいんぐうぃっち
7. モブサイコ100
6. ユーリ!!! on ICE
5. 昭和元禄落語心中
4. 舟を編む
3. 傷物語〈Ⅰ鉄血篇〉
2. 響け!ユーフォニアム2
1. 傷物語〈Ⅱ熱血篇〉
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Feb 05, 2017 10:54 pm

Aand, it's been another month without updates! To be honest, I'm not sure if it's more honest to say that a lot has happened in this time or that not enough has happened. I guess I better report on everything in order.

First week back from the winter break wasn't particularly hard, but the intensified studying during the last few days of the break led to another bottleneck in Anki reviews. By the end of the week I was feeling swamped with them, so in addition to further deck optimizations (most notably suspending the Georgian deck) I decided to try a new time management strategy - instead of spending my commuting time reading I would spend it doing reviews. That way I would have fewer of them left to do at home and could actually get some studying done in the evening - or at least go to bed at a reasonable time. The first week of this new approach worked really well, as there wasn't really much to do at work and I could get some studying and reading done, but the following week went less spectacularly. While we didn't have quite as much work as in December, there was still basically no time to devote to studying, and I would be too tired to study in the evenings; I just barely managed to complete one lesson of Slovak and Arabic each and practically nothing else. The following week, which is to say the week that just ended, went somewhat better - I did something in all of my languages, but still only got one lesson each for Slovak and Arabic, which is a bit too slow a pace for my goals. Hopefully once I get the number of reviews under control I'll manage to make this work a little better.

Anyway, studying Slovak has been interesting so far. Some things about it make it a little more familiar and accessible than some of the other Slavic languages - like the near absence of the vocative or the lack of difficult sounds for Russian speakers (like the Czech ř or the Polish variety of fricatives). However, some things take getting used to, like having to use an auxiliary verb to form the past tense in the first and second person (apparently a somewhat more conservative retention of the Proto-Slavic perfect tense), or the fact that verb forms ending in -m are first person singular and not plural (hard to think of any in Russian aside from ем/"I eat" and the outdated есмь/"I am"). In addition to the course I've also started writing Lang-8 entries in Slovak, and yesterday I also bought a collection of modern (starting from the 1950s) Slovak poetry with parallel Russian translations.

Speaking of purchases, I also couldn't resist buying a phraseological dictionary of Old Church Slavonic. While I'm supposed to have moved on from that language, this dictionary seems just perfect for sentence mining, as it introduces idioms and collocations with explanations and examples from the corpus. I'll try not to get too carried away, especially considering that I haven't actually started reading the Old Norse texts yet - I've been very slowly making my way through the grammar introduction at the end of Gordon's book.

In reading news, I'm finally done with the 響け!ユーフォニアム series, and since I can't get my hands on the spinoff yet I have restarted reading the book I was reading when before Eupho - Yasunari Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain (山の音). The old copy in pre-reform orthography is a lot easier to read on my second attempt - not sure if it's an effect of my studies of Classical Japanese and Chinese, or just more experience in reading Japanese. And while I ran into this book completely by accident rather than conscious choice, I couldn't help but snicker in self-satisfaction when reading this New Yorker article I came across recently, particularly the bit where an elderly Japanese person calls Kawabata "[real] Japanese literature" as opposed to the writing of Haruki Murakami :D Incidentally, here is another fascinating article analysing Murakami's writing style within the contexts of Japanese literature and the globalisation of popular literature.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Mar 05, 2017 11:10 pm

Looks like writing monthly posts instead of weekly ones is the new normal for me :) I didn't really have much to report on the first two weeks after my last post - in the first week because everything had gone exactly as planned and there were no surprises, and in the second one because I barely got any language learning done. The following weeks were a mixed bag, but I got a bit too busy with other stuff on the weekends and never managed to write updates here.

Anyway, big thing out of the way first - unfortunately the chances of me making it to the Polyglot Gathering in Bratislava this year are looking pretty slim. Unless my situation changes drastically within a month or so it's probably best to work under the assumption that I won't be attending. I have completed the A1 Slovak course on the website though, so I guess it's a relatively good place to suspend my studies of that language (切りがいい, as they say in Japanese). It's a shame that I'm probably not gonna get to use the language any time soon, but at least I'm glad I got to try out an interesting but oft overlooked Slavic language. I also got to experience a bizarre pop cultural connection between Russia and Slovakia by watching the Slovak dub of Morozko, a Soviet film known to Russians as a charming and nostalgic children's classic, to some Americans as a so-bad-it's-good piece of Eastern European weirdness (thanks to it being featured in an episode of MST3K), and to people of former Czechoslovakia as a winter holiday staple, comparable to A Christmas Story in the US or Irony of Fate in Russia. I thought it would be a good idea to dive into native materials via content that I'm already familiar with, only to realize after I started watching that... I've probably never actually seen the movie in Russian in its entirety. Or at least not at an age I can remember clearly enough :D Still, I got the gist of most of the scenes, so I guess it wasn't entirely pointless. The movie's available on YouTube in its entirety in Russian, English, Czech, Slovak and maybe other languages, in case anyone's curious.

Not really much to report in other languages, other than that I've finally finished going through the grammar introduction section of Gordon's Introduction to Old Norse and can finally start trying to read the actual texts. That was more than a week ago though, so I should try harder to make time for it next week. I also got an interesting-looking book on Koine Greek as a present from my mother, so that's something to look forward to after I'm done with my Ancient Greek readings.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Fri Mar 10, 2017 9:10 pm

Surprise Friday post! I actually originally wanted to write this as part of my previous post, but it was getting late and the whole thing ended up being longer than I had anticipated. Only now did I finally get the time to finish this properly.

Anyway, I'd like to do something I haven't done on my logs in ages, namely lyrical analysis. There's a bit of a story behind why I got the desire to do this all of a sudden. The recent announcement of the upcoming anime 夜は短し歩けよ乙女 got me curious about the title, or rather what it might be referencing. I knew this was far from the first time I was seeing a phrase structured something like "X(は)短し(、)Y(よ)乙女", so I knew that it had to be a reference. A quick search revealed that it was the Gondola song, a somewhat well-known pre-war Japanese popular song that got immortalized by Akira Kurosawa's masterpiece Ikiru (I guess I would have realized this much earlier had I actually watched the film, like I was planning to for ages...). Here's the interesting thing though - it seems to me like all the translations of the lyrics of this song, including those in subtitled versions of the movie, are a bit off in places. On the one hand it's understandable - the lyrics are full of archaisms and aren't exactly straightforward. But on the other hand, it seems hard to believe that no one has ever pointed out the errors in translation that seem so obvious to me. Let's go line by line.

Verse 1
いのち短し 恋せよ乙女
"Life is short; (fall in) love, maiden(s)"
Many if not most translations use the plural instead of the singular. Both could work in this line in isolation. I personally think that translating it as consistently singular throughout the text makes more sense. It should become clearer why after the explanations below.

あかき唇 あせぬ間に
"While (your) red lips haven't faded"

熱き血潮の 冷えぬ間に
"While the hot blood (circulating within you) hasn't grown cold"

明日の月日は ないものを
"For there is no time tomorrow"
Here is the major stumbling block, one that's repeated at the end of every verse and one that affects nearly all of the available translations. In fact I've only been able to find one translation whose interpretation of this line is more or less the same as mine (though I do have other issues with that particular translation). The point of contention here is the construction ものを, which is rendered in most translations as something like "for those who"; this line in particular becomes "For those of you who know no tomorrow". I can see how this construction can be interpreted like that, but it seems like a highly counterintuitive way of translating it, as it meshes somewhat poorly with the rest of the text, even if you do take the first line as addressing numerous maidens instead of one in particular. Why would the singer suddenly decide to narrow down his audience in such a cryptic way?

The line makes a lot more sense if you keep in mind the less literal use of ものを. In modern Japanese it's occasionally used in the meaning of "although" (though not as commonly as ものの, or especially なのに), but in Classical Japanese poetry it had another meaning - indicating that the preceding passage explains a reason for something (equivalent to modern Japanese ので or だから). I went with "for" since it sounds a bit more poetic, but "as" or "because" would have also worked.

Incidentally, this line (as well as the fourth one of the third verse) also contains the strongest piece of evidence that the song is in a highly archaized form of grammatically modern Japanese rather than in full on Classical Japanese - the word ない, which is a markedly modern form descended from the older なき. Anyway, on to the second verse.

Verse 2
いのち短し 恋せよ乙女
"Life is short; (fall in) love, maiden"

いざ手をとりて かの舟に
"Now then, (let me) take (your) hand (and take you) to that boat"
This verse is the least straightforward in terms of subjects and objects, so multiple interpretations are possible in this and the following line. It'll be clearer in later lines why I think the interpretation that the subject is the singer and not the maiden being addressed, but for now suffice it to say that the classical uses of いざ include both encouragement of others and announcement of one's own action.

This line also contains the other stumbling block - the pronoun かの, which often ends up translated as "his" instead of "that". This probably isn't helped when some lyrics sources render it as 彼の, which can be mistaken for modern Japanese かれの. However, in all recordings of the song it's clear that かの is what's supposed to be sung, and that pronoun was always a distal pronoun for indicating objects distant from both speaker and listener (equivalent of modern あの) and never a personal one. So no, I'm fairly certain that there is no man other than the singer being brought into the story here.

いざ燃ゆる頬を 君が頬に
"Now then, (let me put my) burning cheek to your cheek"
This line also gets translated in a variety of ways, some of which stump me. I frankly don't see how this line can be interpreted that the burning cheek and the maiden's cheek are one and the same, or that the latter turns into the former (the opposite could be inferred from the structure of the sentence, but that doesn't really make sense). While, as I said above, the song isn't completely in Classical Japanese, all instances of the particle が in it only seem to make sense as the genitive rather than the modern nominative. As long as you keep that in mind the line seems pretty straightforward, aside from the ambiguity about the subject, which is resolved in the following verse.

ここには誰れも 来ぬものを
"For nobody (else) will come here"
Other translations, operating under the aforementioned assumptions about ものを end up with something like "For those of you who will never return here", which appears to erase 誰れも entirely. I won't speculate about possible deeper meanings of this line that could tie it to the overall theme of the song, but at least the surface-level interpretation seems straightforward to me - "there will be nobody else around to disturb our date".

Verse 3 (a lot of the covers omit this one entirely)
いのち短し 恋せよ乙女
"Life is short; (fall in) love, maiden"

波にただよう 舟のよに
"Like a boat drifting on the waves"
I was doubting whether or not the よ is in fact meant to be equivalent to 様 (よう), but after a bit of googling it seems like this contraction is used from time to time in song lyrics. Also, in some of the covers I've heard (like this one here) this line is sung as 波にただよ のよに - "Drifting on the waves, like the waves (themselves?)".

君が柔わ手を 我が肩に
"(Put) your soft hand onto my shoulder"
This is the line that most unambiguously introduces the singer's character into the song, while also reinforcing the fact that the addressee is a specific woman. Needless to say, this is the main reason for my specific interpretations of the context of earlier lines. However, since this verse does often get omitted, it's entirely possible to interpret the song differently without it.

ここには人目も 無いものを
"For there aren't even any strangers' gazes here"
The Wikipedia article translates this one as "for those who will never be seen here again". To me the line seems to be echoing the message of the last line of the previous verse.

Verse 4
いのち短し 恋せよ乙女
"Life is short; (fall in) love, maiden(s)"

黒髪の色 褪せぬ間に
"While the colour of (your) black hair hasn't faded"

心のほのお 消えぬ間に
"While the flame of (your) heart hasn't gone out"

今日はふたたび 来ぬものを
"For today will not come again"
Or "for those to whom today will never return" in the film's translations, which admittedly doesn't take away from the intended meaning of this song in the context of the film. Still, gotta nitpick whenever I can :)


Ultimately, the fact that the film uses only the first and last verses of the song helps keep its subject matter vague enough for it to fit very strongly into the film's main carpe diem message, and also means that the misinterpreted final lines don't harm it too much in translation. But if you don't throw out the two middle lines it becomes clear that the song is less an exhortation to all young ladies everywhere to "love while you're young" and more like one guy going "Hey girl, there's this secluded place I know, we should totally check it out together, and we should do it as soon as possible, before you become so old that nobody will want you" :D
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Apr 09, 2017 4:00 pm

I've already mentioned it in the Polyglot Gathering thread, but it looks like I'll be going to Bratislava after all! Because of this I've resumed the Slovak courses and also watched the Slovak dubs of a couple other Soviet children's classics (the animated features The Scarlet Flower and Thumbelina). The organizers of the Gathering have started their own challenge to learn Slovak or Esperanto from scratch in 50 days, but I probably don't qualify, since I've already started on Slovak and have tried learning Esperanto before.

In news about other languages, I've finished going through the annotated commentaries on the 百人一首 poems in Classical Japanese and resumed reading Syromyatnikov's overview of Old Japanese. I've also been steadily moving through Gordon's Old Norse readings as well as readings in other languages. I've also bought another Ilya Frank reader, this time Sholem Aleichem's short stories in Yiddish, which should come in handy when I get to that language. While I generally manage to fit activities in most of my languages into a week, I'm not really dedicating as much time as I would like to languages I need to focus on (right now Slovak and Arabic). I did have the week up to now off from work, but it happened to coincide with the start of the new anime season. Hopefully I'll be able to get my Slovak to a presentable level by the time I go to the Gathering.
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun May 21, 2017 6:03 pm

Got my visa on Friday, so now it's official - heading to Slovakia in nine days! Since the two-day trip after the end of the Polyglot Gathering was cancelled I also have a spare day on the June 6, which I'll probably be spending in Vienna. Looking forward to making a fool of myself in Slovak and German :D

Slovak is probably the language I've been doing most consistently since my last update - I've now finished the A2 course and started the one for B1. Though since I've sort of been slacking off on my active skills I'm not sure if I'll even be able to communicate at the A1 level - not without my speech turning into a Russian-Slovak-Serbian-Ukrainian jumble anyway :)

Arabic has been... frustrating. As I've mentioned in another thread, I have a hard time studying languages with complex conjugation and declension patterns. While on a first glance Arabic may look less complex in this regard than some European languages (two genders instead of three, three cases instead of six or seven, three tenses instead of seven or so, etc.), the conjugation and declension paradigms are variegated to a comparable extent, not to mention exceptions. I run into similar issues with Latin, OCS and especially Ancient Greek, but with those languages I at least have the overall familiarity of grammatical concepts and large chunks of the vocabulary to fall back on. As a non Indo-European language Arabic obviously does a lot of things differently, and as a language with a long literary history it has its own tradition of grammatical study with some concepts being used somewhat differently from the way they're used in European philology. Because of all of this, as well as the fact that I tend to prioritise passive understanding heavily over active use, when going through the lessons on Madinah Arabic I tend to let most of the grammatical explanations fly over my head and just mine the lessons for sentences. And since the introduction of vocabulary in the lessons isn't nearly as systematic as the introduction of grammar points, the new words don't really stick a lot of the time. I'm at lesson 53 of the 89 available, but I don't think I have the motivation to go on further with them. Today I decided to just move on.

As for the reading part of the Arabic leg of my challenge, I think I'll try going through the Word by Word feature of The Quranic Arabic Corpus, where the grammar and semantics of each and every verse of the Qur'an is analysed, well, word by word. Maybe this way of presenting grammatical information will work better. I will also be starting New Persian (Dari) and re-starting Avar. For the latter I'll be returning to the self-learning book I tried earlier, whereas for the former I think I'll try the DLI course.

Unfortunately, with the focus on Slovak and Arabic my studies in other languages have suffered, with especially little progress in Estonian lessons and Old Norse readings. Hopefully I'll manage to pick the pace back up with Arabic and Slovak out of the way.

Edit: Forgot to mention that I had finally finished adding the reconstructed Middle Chinese pronunciations to all the cards in my Classical Chinese deck... only to immediately start adding the Modern Mandarin ones. I initially intended to approach Classical Chinese as a completely separate language from Modern Standard Chinese, like I've previously done with Ancient and Modern Greek, and therefore I deliberately omitted the modern Mandarin pronunciations of the characters. However, since I do eventually intend to pick Mandarin back up, it feels like it would be a waste not to try to at least get a head start on the vocabulary by memorizing some of the pronunciations. I'll still be mainly testing myself on understanding rather than pronunciation when reviewing the deck, but I'll also try to remember the Mandarin pronunciations of at least some of the characters.
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