JLS log - Spanish, Greek, Hebrew, Latin, Chinese

[JLS]

Did some sight-reading on Wikipedia. I comprehend nothing, but some of the hiragana are immediately striking my mind with their associated sounds. Small step forward.

[golyplot]

Did some sight-reading on Wikipedia. I comprehend nothing, but some of the hiragana are immediately striking my mind with their associated sounds. Small step forward.

FYI, Japanese Wikipedia tends to be especially difficult to read due to heavy use of kanji. For a beginner, it's like a giant wall of interchangeable rectangle blobs.

[JLS]

Did some sight-reading on Wikipedia. I comprehend nothing, but some of the hiragana are immediately striking my mind with their associated sounds. Small step forward.

FYI, Japanese Wikipedia tends to be especially difficult to read due to heavy use of kanji. For a beginner, it's like a giant wall of interchangeable rectangle blobs.

Yes, and the experience does force me to keep it real.

I did notice that some pages will have little katakana, but others will be profuse with it. Perhaps it depends on the subject.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Great theme to apply this to. Would Greeks really have responded to disasters and large-scale shakeups differently than men and women today?

It may depend on who is writing, and for what purpose too. If Thucydides are Herodotus were writing in order to move people in a certain way, then it's reasonable to find out the emotional element that they intended to produce, and then create association between that and the words and phrases they used. However, if these guys are more "textbook fashion" (which I doubt), there may not be much emotional element at all. It will depend on the genre.

I did experience something yesterday of what I was talking about. As I was working through something in my mind, a psalm came to my mind in its original language, and I get benefit from the psalm in its original Hebrew, and not from the Hebrew translated. I didn't even need to translate it. The living and emotional element of the original Hebrew as Hebrew came to me.

Still pondering this. Thucydides and Herodotus definitely were not ´textbook' writers. Broadly speaking, they engaged in 'telling what happened,' but the events they described were so fundamental to the Greek experience and to the existence of Greek ways of life that they touched deeply on the minds of their readers. However, few reactions to the work of Thucydides exist until Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic and historian himself, but not writing until the 1st century BC, 2 or 3 centuries after Thucydides wrote. Herododotus, on the other hand, according to some of the scholars who study his work, gave public readings of at least some of his writing. Did the sweep of his narrative stir his listeners? Hard to say, but likely. Does it stir me? Yes, at least to the extent that he is a great writer, and great writing stirs me. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps this petty pace from day to day." That sort of moving phrase. Just yesterday, one of our members described the short story Alfonse Daudet wrote about the last day Prussian conquerors allow French to be taught in a newly recaptured Alsacian school. Easy enough for me to sympathize with and be moved by, even as if I were myself a French-speaking citizen of the times.
So, yes. I believe you propose a useful model for the reading of the Ancient Greeks, or at least certainly of their two most prominent historians.

[JLS]

Great theme to apply this to. Would Greeks really have responded to disasters and large-scale shakeups differently than men and women today?

It may depend on who is writing, and for what purpose too. If Thucydides are Herodotus were writing in order to move people in a certain way, then it's reasonable to find out the emotional element that they intended to produce, and then create association between that and the words and phrases they used. However, if these guys are more "textbook fashion" (which I doubt), there may not be much emotional element at all. It will depend on the genre.

I did experience something yesterday of what I was talking about. As I was working through something in my mind, a psalm came to my mind in its original language, and I get benefit from the psalm in its original Hebrew, and not from the Hebrew translated. I didn't even need to translate it. The living and emotional element of the original Hebrew as Hebrew came to me.

Still pondering this. Thucydides and Herodotus definitely were not ´textbook' writers. Broadly speaking, they engaged in 'telling what happened,' but the events they described were so fundamental to the Greek experience and to the existence of Greek ways of life that they touched deeply on the minds of their readers. However, few reactions to the work of Thucydides exist until Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a literary critic and historian himself, but not writing until the 1st century BC, 2 or 3 centuries after Thucydides wrote. Herododotus, on the other hand, according to some of the scholars who study his work, gave public readings of at least some of his writing. Did the sweep of his narrative stir his listeners? Hard to say, but likely. Does it stir me? Yes, at least to the extent that he is a great writer, and great writing stirs me. "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps this petty pace from day to day." That sort of moving phrase. Just yesterday, one of our members described the short story Alfonse Daudet wrote about the last day Prussian conquerors allow French to be taught in a newly recaptured Alsacian school. Easy enough for me to sympathize with and be moved by, even as if I were myself a French-speaking citizen of the times.
So, yes. I believe you propose a useful model for the reading of the Ancient Greeks, or at least certainly of their two most prominent historians.

Thanks. Thought of this too, that oratory was important to Greeks and Romans, of which no small part was persuasion. That includes emotional. Is there perhaps some of this in the writings? The orators understood that you can't move the head without moving the emotions.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Yes. Knowledge and use of oratory appears often in Herodotus, and Thucydides devises many whole speeches that he attributes, correctly or not, to many historical figures in his histories.

[JLS]

I'm pleasantly surprised how relatively easy sight-reading the hiragana is coming. I'm familiar with at least 30 characters now, and when I pull up Wikipedia JP I see the hiragana and near-instantly know how the character sounds. I certainly was not at this level this early with Hebrew when I started it years ago.

I comprehend nothing, granted, but if the sight-reading comes easy it should help in attaining speedier fluency.

[JLS]

Officially throwing Japanese into the mix.

[JLS]

おはよう！I now know the 46 hiragana, and I know what the vocal shift marks do to each one. I will start on katakana.

I'm using DuoLingo to learn these. I don't have any plan to use DuoLingo extensively. Everywhere I look I see it's viewed as a supplement at best, but should by no means be the staple. I think DuoLingo's progress is a little slow anyway.

[JLS]

I feel well-set with hiragana. I can sight-read for sound just fine (though not for comprehension).

I am halfway through learning the katakana. I realized that there is opportunity for katakana to come more intuitively to an English speaker than hiragana. Because katakana are used for loan words, it will be easier to remember the katakana based on their use for English loan words. What American cannot appreciate the relative ease of remembering アメリカ?