עברית סוף סוף - Hebrew and German, and Anglophone Lit

[Deinonysus]

Magyar
I was the first in my class to present and I wrapped up Hungarian once I was done, so I didn't actually study it very long. I got to wrap my head around the basics. Hungarian, is such a fun language. I'll need to get back to it!

My presentation went very well. In fact, I had to cut it short for a bit. I guess I was a bit overzealous! I went over Hungarian pronunciation and a bit of grammar, and I played some exerpts of For Children and Mikrokosmos on my keyboard. I paused a bit and sometimes I couldn't think of exactly how to say something in German (I forgot that a letter of the alphabet is der Buchstabe so I had to ask the professor!), but I think I did well overall and was able to mostly speak continuously. The professor said that if I were being graded he would have given me an A+.

עברית
Hebrew is slow but steady. I got some encouragement when I was able to sound out the Ten Plagues in Hebrew, without pausing except on the last plague, at my ‎parents' seder. I brought home some extra children's books to read.

I haven't been doing Assimil for a while but I think I'll get back to it in a few days. I'm finishing up the primer first. I'm too tired to do much by the time I'm done with baby stuff for the night but I try to do a little bit of Hebrew every night.

Deutsch
I'd like to finish Duolingo but they're working on a complete overhaul of the German tree so there isn't much point in working on it until then.

Soon we'll be going over adjective endings in class, which I've addressed in another log. It's a tricky subject so hopefully that should clarify things. I don't think we'll end up having time to go over das Präteritum and we probably won't start reading the YA novel, although I can always read it on my own.

With only a few classes left, I'm still far from fluent in German, but my ‎grammar is solidified and I have a lot of new vocabulary. I need to review verbs with prepositions, and then I want to start memorizing a lot of verbs. I'll do full conjugation (infinitive, imperative, participle, present, preterite, and both subjunctives) for the three auxiliary and six modal verbs, and then skip the subjuctive for the rest of Barrons' 55 "essential verbs", and then finally only memorize the principal parts (infinitive, 3rd person singular past, past participle, and 3rd person singular present) for the rest of the 501 verbs.

[Deinonysus]

עברית

I finished the primer. I should probably go back and keep reviewing it until everything sinks in.

I've been making good progress with Pimsleur. I'm 1/9 of the way there.

I still haven't gotten back to doing an Assimil lesson a day, but hopefully I will soon.

I'm giving Duolingo another look. I don't think it's that inconvenient to look up the pronunciation of unknown words until I have them memorized. As a false beginner I know most of the vocabulary in the very beginning anyway. I'm giving it a shot.

Deutsch
I made it through a year of class! I think it was very helpful in filling in the gaps. I have my final exam coming up soon (not for credit but I'll Hermione it anyway). I think I have adjective endings figured out but I still really need to go over verbs with prepositions and refresh the vocabulary.

As I suspected we didn't end up getting around to das Präteritum, but that will come when I start memorizing conjugations.

[Deinonysus]

I think starting Duolingo Hebrew was a good decision. It's helping my motivation and it's really helping me to get a feel for Hebrew spelling.

Hebrew spelling is truly atrocious. It's worse than French and possibly even worse than English. Yes, it is an abjad so vowels aren't written, but things are even worse in standard modern Hebrew due to consonants that are either merged or not even pronounced at all (although the distinctions may be preserved in some dialects). So not only can you not read a word if you don't already know it, you also can't write a word you've heard unless you already know how to spell it. You can guess but there are probably a dozen variations of how to spell any given word that you hear.

Merged:

• ק and כ (when pronounced /k/)
• ח and כ (when pronounced /x/)
• ב and ו (when pronounced /v/)
• ס and ש (when pronounced /s/)
• ט and ת
• א and ע (when pronounced as a glottal stop between consecutive vowels)

Silent:

• א
• ע
• ה at the end of a word

There may be others that I'm missing.

On top of that, /o/ and /u/ may or may not be followed by a <ו>, and /i/ may or may not be followed by a <י>.

But it is very satisfying to learn how to spell words one by one. It's like being in on a secret code. And Duolingo's gamification helps too, with levels to grind and a nice fanfare every time you accomplish anything.

[Deinonysus]

Deutsch

I had a great day for German! I finished my final exam for the course I've been taking. The grade doesn't count for anything since I'm just auditing but it gave me a goal to study for. Unfortunately I barely got to study at all because of a busy schedule, but I was able to focus on my only weak spot (verbs with prepositions) and I'm pretty sure I aced the test!

But the best part came afterwards. The professor emailed me and said:

1. I should sign up to tutor at the school since my German is "extremely solid"
2. He'd be willing to meet up for lunches and speak German with me.

Um yes please!

I think I'm pretty good on verbs with prepositions and adjective endings for now. They'll get better with use. I'll pick Duolingo German back up once the new course is released. I think the next thing for me to work on is bulking up my vocabulary and as I mentioned, I want to start with verbs.

I'm working off of Barron's 501 verbs but it's hard to organize my time around it because it isn't structured. I found a website that can help me drill the conjugations:
http://www.listeningpractice.org/conjug ... p?lang=deu

(They seem to have a lot of other language resources too)

עברית

Since I'll be putting a lot of focus on German, Hebrew might take a back seat for a little while. I might drop Hebrew altogether for a little while, but I'll pick it back up as soon as I start to plateau with German. I'll at least be doing Hebrew Pimsleur over the summer since I don't have much Pimsleur German left.

[Deinonysus]

So when I said I was stepping away from Hebrew in favor of German, that was a lie. I haven't spent any time on German since my last post, and I've been doing exactly what I have been doing all along with Hebrew: doing around 15 minutes of Pimsleur and between 20 and 160 XP of Duolingo every day. I guess there's no stopping inertia. I've been avoiding Hebrew for years so I really can't complain that I have some momentum now.

I think I'm starting to get a feel for the spelling patterns, and more importantly, I'm developing some connotations for the different letters. ק (/k/), ח (/x/), ט (/t/), ס (/s/), and ע (glottal stop or bare vowel) feel cool and exotic while כ (/k/ or /x/), ת (/t/) , ש (/s/ or /ʃ/) and א (glottal stop or bare vowel) seem a bit more plain. I mentally flag words as being special if they have any of the "exotic" letters and that helps me remember.

Also, ו never seems to represent /v/ internally within a word, only when it's used as the prefix meaning "and". So I never confuse it with ב (/b/ or /v/) like I was afraid I would.

My goal for tonight is to review Assimil lesson 8. The lessons are so light in the beginning that it should only take 5 or 10 minutes. I've been sucked into George R R Martin's Dunk and Egg stories but I should still be able to set aside such a modest amount of time.

[Deinonysus]

Friday was a good day for Hebrew. I finished a lesson and a half of Pimsleur and went on a 500 XP Duolingo rampage and got every lesson before the first checkpoint up to Crown Level 4. I even did an Assimil lesson and another on Saturday, although I was derailed last night due to the Game of Thrones finale.

Past the first checkpoint are the first two skills with a lot of vocabulary that's unfamiliar to me, and it's really showcasing Duolingo's weakness with Hebrew. I need to keep looking up words in Wiktionary until I have the pronunciation memorized. It's very frustrating that they don't at least have a transliteration when you hover over a Hebrew word. Another issue is that the fill-in-the-blank exercises have the word order scrambled. I think it's a technical glitch due to the fields being coded as left-to-right. This also results in having a lot of punctuation in the wrong spot. It's very frustrating to see how a couple of simple issues are preventing this from being a very good tree.

[Deinonysus]

Keyboard Layout

I started writing a post, then I got mad that the Hebrew keyboard layout sucks so I made a new layout. I left the basic layout the same, but now all special characters including נקדות (nekudot) are accessible using the shift key. It also has full Yiddish support.

The biggest problem with the standard layout is that it's missing some important Hebrew punctuation so you can't properly mark Hebrew-letter numbers like א׳) 1) and ח״י‎ (18), as well as abbreviations. And I also added left-to-right and right-to-left markers, which are very important it you want to have Hebrew and English words in the same paragraph! I also added a non-breaking space so Hebrew phrases won't get messed up by wrapping over to the next line.

In the standard Hebrew layout the shift key gets you capital English letters in the QWERTY layout, but you can't type lowercase letters. In my layout, you just press the alt-gr key with or without shift to get a full QWERTY layout so you can quickly type in English without having to switch layouts.

Progress

I've been making good progress in Hebrew on all fronts, and I've even managed to do an Assimil lesson a day, which I had been struggling with.

I also went through an extended Hebrew passage in the introduction of book 1 of 3 in Hebrew: A Language Course. The book is called עיברת שלב א׳ (Hebrew Level 1). It only uses very basic vocubulary that was covered in the primer plus some religious terminology that the reader is expected to know (I had to look up תפילה, meaning prayer; the word seemed familiar but I forgot what it meant), but it's pretty lengthy, almost a full page, so it was pretty satisfying to be able to read a passage that long.

Today's Pimsleur lesson introduced one of Hebrew's coolest grammatical features: inflecting nouns to indicate a posessor. The inflected words they introduced were בעל (husband) and אשה (wife), inflected as בעלי (my husband) and אשתי (my wife), as well as בעלך (your husband) and אשתך (your wife). The final vowel changes for the 2nd person depending on the gender of the posessor, but the spelling does not. You can only expect Pimsleur to be so progressive so I think they're sticking to opposite-gender spouses.

Unfortunately this feature is not used much in spoken Modern Hebrew except in this specific instance. Instead, you would just inflect של (of) instead, so "my cake" would be העוגה שלי rather than עוגתי. I guess this puts it in the same class as the simple past in French or German: people know it but they use it barely if at all.

[Deinonysus]

It looks like they rolled out Duolingo Leagues to the desktop version this week. I hadn't participated before because it's app only. I never use the app because it doesn't let you type in answers until later levels and instead makes you use a word bank; I like to type from the beginning because I think it helps me learn the words and spelling more quickly, and gets the typing in my muscle memory (if I'm using a physical keyboard).

Since I'm just starting, I'm in a Bronze league, but I shouldn't have much trouble getting into Silver. The top 10 promote and I'm #4, closing in on #3. I'm making a good pace at around 200 XP a day. I'll probably see how competitive Silver is next week (although since it's a random selection of 50 people who promoted from bronze it could vary).

At level 11, Hebrew is already my sixth highest-level language on Duolingo, and I only started it this month! It passed Esperanto yesterday and it should be passing Danish within the next couple of days. It should take another month at this pace to pass Spanish and Indonesian to make it into my top 3 (after French and German).

In other news, I have ברווזוני (barvazóni, the Hebrew version of the Seseme Street song "Rubber Ducky") stuck in my head. It doesn't literally mean "rubber duck", but it's the word for "duck" ברווז (barváz) with a diminutive suffix "-on" (‏-ון) and then another "-i" (‎‏-י), I guess to fit the syllable scheme of the original. Unfortunately, I don't know most of the words so it's basically "ברווזוני, אני אוהב אותך" (ducky I love you) on repeat with a bunch of gibberish filling in for the rest of the lyrics that I don't know.

I was watching Kimmy Schmidt yesterday and there was a random couple of lines in Hebrew at the end of an episode. I actually understood most of it!

[Deinonysus]

Epic Greek

I successfully avoided getting sucked into Russian after watching Chernobyl, but no such luck with Greek.

Greek is a natural pairing with Hebrew as the primary language of the New Testament. But it made sense to me to start at the beginning and work forwards from there, so I'm starting with Epic, or Homeric, Greek, the dialect of the foundational works of Greek literature.

I started looking through an old public domain edition of Pharr's Homeric Greek: a Book for Beginners, but it was completely unusable. Lesson 1 was: flip to the back of the book and memorize some charts. Lesson 2, flip to the back of the book and memorize some more charts, etc. I got a copy of the fourth edition (2012) and it's a thousand times better. The are much more clear explanations and you never need to flip to the back of the book. Like the original, it takes you through book one of the Iliad, which is super exciting! One of the most important works in the Western Canon in the original!

This is the opposite of my usual approach to learning languages. I generally start learning individual words and phrases through beginner materials and then figure out the general rules later. But hear I'm learning inflectional paradigms and then applying them. Now that I'm becoming a more experienced language learner, maybe this will be more efficient.

I was expecting to just peruse the first couple of chapters, but Ancient Greek is SO DANG COOL. I might just finish the while book, who knows? The spoken language sounds very similar to Japanese, with a pitch accent and similar prosody, but I prefer the vowel inventory of Ancient Greek.

My many dabblings have left me with enough of a bag of tricks to pronounce Ancient Greek with restored pronunciation more or less correctly. Due to my work with Icelandic, I don't have much problem with an aspirated-unaspirated distinction, and I'm also comfortable with vowel one consonant length distinctions.

I don't have quite as much experience with pitch accents, but I think I have enough exposure to Japanese and Norwegian that I can at least fake it. I pronounce everything with a low pitch, except a high pitch on accented short vowels, a glide from low to high for acute accented long vowels, and a glide from high to low on a circumflex accent. I leave everything low for a grave accent.

So far I've memorized the restored pronunciation of the Modern Greek letter names (slightly anachronistic but it's a good exercise) and the declension of the feminine word βουλή (meaning will, wish, plan, purpose, counsel, or council). It's the first paradigm of the first of three declensions.

Declension 1A was actually really easy to learn as a German speaker, especially in the singular. It has the same four cases as German, plus a vocative that is identical to the nominative. The singular accusative ends with a /n/ sound and the genitive ends with a /s/ sound, just like the German masculine articles den and des.

Another similarity with German is that Epic Greek uses the dative case for action at or within a location and the Accusitive for action into a location. Epic Greek takes this to its logical end by using the genitive for movement AWAY from a location. So even though it is missing separate locative, ablative, and allative cases, it fills these functions using existing cases. I never thought about it this way before, but you could use the same logic to say that German has six cases, not four.

The genitive ends with ῇ and is pronounced the same as the nominative except for tone, and the subscript iota which is only pronounced if the next word starts with a vowel. Modern Greek lost the pitch accent so I wonder if that had anything to do with it losing the dative.

עיברית

I've been keeping up with Hebrew pretty well. I've been home in paternity leave for a couple of weeks, and since I mainly use pimsleur on my commute I haven't made much progress with it. But I've been keeping up with Assimil and now I'm more than a quarter of the way through the course.

Assimil Hebrew has so much unfamiliar vocabulary that I've needed to add in an extra wave. After I do a lesson, I also redo the seventh lesson back, so that I revisit each lesson after a week. This is helping me to absorb the new vocabulary better.

I was a Duolingo fiend up until a week ago, but I've dropped off lately, barely maintaining my streak. Other things just seem more interesting. I'm back to work tomorrow so maybe I'll spend more time in Duolingo if I get downtime.

Anglophone Literature

One of my goals in learning other languages is to be able to read a lot of the Western Canon in the original. But the most represented language in most Western Canon lists is English, which I got for free. I sadly haven't read many Anglophone classics. I was a very bad student in high school English. So there's no time like the present!

I just finished reading HG Wells' "The Time Machine", and now I'm reading "War of the Worlds". After that, I want to read a couple of more "serious" books: Emma and Great Expectations. That will give me a sense of accomplishment, and in particular I was supposed to read Great Expectations in school but never got past the first couple of chapters.

And then it'll be back to SciFi, horror and adventure books: Frankenstein, Dracula, more short stories by HG Wells, and also some Robert Lewis Stevenson and maybe some Poe. But that will take time, which I don't have much of. So we'll see how far I get.

Deutsch

I haven't done any work on it since my class ended so I'll consider it dropped for now. Hopefully my time memorizing Epic Greek charts out of a book will build my skills and make it easier for me to power through a bunch of German conjugation down the road.

[Deinonysus]

Hebrew is neat but already a slog, whereas I'm always excited for my next chance to work on Epic Greek. But the honeymoon period can't last forever; everything turns into a slog eventually. We'll see what happens when I reach that point with Greek.

I'm finding Epic Greek much easier than Hebrew. It is hard, but generally in the same ways that German is hard, and I've already put plenty of time into German. But Hebrew is hard in unpredictable and alien ways. I never know what the next difficulty will be.

I've been looking at the Wiki article on Ancient Greek phonology, and I don't know exactly how accurate it is but it doesn't always agree with my book, because I think the book teaches Erasmian and Classical pronunciation. To anyone reading this who isn't familiar with it, Erasmian is basically classical pronunciation but with a few changes to help learners with the pronunciation; most notably, ϕ, θ, and χ are pronounced as the Modern Greek fricatives /f θ χ/ instead of the Ancient Greek aspirated plosives/tʰ pʰ kʰ/ because most learners have a lot of trouble distinguishing between aspirated and unaspirated consonants.

But I digress. Even Classical pronunciation would not be accurate for the Iliad and the Odyssey because there are some sound changes in the Classical era (5th century BC) that hasn't happened yet when they were written. In particular, the digraphs ει, ου, and υι were still pronounced as diphthongs. They became the monophthongs /eː uː yː/ in the early classical period. So I started out pronouncing βουλή as /buː.lɛː˩˥/, but after reading that wiki article I started pronouncing it /bow.lɛː˩˥/.

The long vowels with iota subscripts ᾳ ῃ ῳ were also apparently pronounced as diphthongs until even later (the Koine period), so I had been pronouncing the genitive singular βουλῇ without a final /j/, but I think I'll start adding that in now.

What I'm still confused about is what to do when there's a long vowel followed by a consonant, or a diphthong starting with a long vowel. A if a weak syllable (open with a short vowel) has a length of one, would a strong syllable have a variable length of two or three? For instance, a syllable ending with ει or εν is already strong (long), but a syllable ending in ῃ or ην must be even longer because η is a long version of ε. So I don't know exactly how to handle that. Maybe dactyls in epic poetry aren't exactly four units of time but can vary? I made an account on the Textkit forum and I'll ask there.