עברית סוף סוף - Hebrew and German, and Anglophone Lit

[cjareck]

Hope you don't mind a small correction

אלף בית

with a ף isn't incorrect, it just needs that space in the middle.

Yes with space it may be but I look at the Hebrew Wikipedia, and there it is written as אלפבית . This caused me to write my remark.

[Deinonysus]

Hope you don't mind a small correction

אלף בית

with a ף isn't incorrect, it just needs that space in the middle.

Yes with space it may be but I look at the Hebrew Wikipedia, and there it is written as אלפבית . This caused me to write my remark.

!cjareck ,תודה רבה

Indeed I did originally write it as two words but then when I saw that it was spelled as one word on Hebrew Wiki I removed the space. But then I wrote it again with no space but with the ף, so I'll need to get the incorrect spelling out of my muscle memory!

!אלפבית אלפבית אלפבית

[Deinonysus]

Iŋgliʃ

I got a bit sidetracked from Hebrew leading up to the weekend. I was sucked into a diaphonemic English orthography system that I've been working on. I learned about lexical sets, which were introduced by John C. Wells in his book Accents of English. Vowels in English are highly divergent phonetically between diffirent dialects. A lexical set is a group of words that tend to be pronounced the same within a dialect even though the pronunciation might be very different from dialect to dialect. For example, the word "square" will be pronounced differently by an American, an Englishman, an Irishman, or a Scot, but within a dialect it will generally rhyme with other words within the same lexical set such as "mare", "there", or "bear". So if vowel symbols match with lexical sets rather than specific sounds, then someone should be able to use these symbols regardless of dialect, although some words can be in different lexical sets in different dialects.

My orthography actually matched up pretty well with the lexical sets already. I tweaked it a little and added a couple more vowel symbols to match Wells' sets exactly. I'll be buying a copy of his book soon and that should help me refine it more. Until then I think I can hold off on my work on the orthography.

Here's a sample:

To̊ bē ôr not to̊ bē, ðat iz ðᵧ qescᵧn:
Ƕeðᵧr 'tiz nōblᵧr in ðᵧ mīnd to̊ sufᵧr
Ðᵧ sliŋz and arōz ov ŏtrạ̄jᵧs fôrtūn,
Ôr to̊ tāk årmz ᵧgānst ᵧ sē ov trubᵧlz
And bī ᵧpōziŋ end ðem. To̊ dī—to̊ slēp,
No mōr; and bī ᵧ slēp to̊ sā wē end
Ðᵧ hårtāk and ðᵧ þŏzᵧnd natūrᵧl ʃoks
Ðat fleʃ iz ār to̊; 'tiz ᵧ konsᵧmạ̄ʃᵧn
Divọ̆tlŷ to̊ bē wiʃt. To̊ dī, to̊ slēp;
To̊ slēp, pᵧrcâns to̊ drēm—ī, ðār'z ðᵧ rub:
Fôr in ðat slēp ov deþ, ƕot drēmz mā kum
Ƕen wē hav ʃufᵧld ôf ðis môrtᵧl ki̊l
Must giv us păz...

עבכית

I got back into the swing of things by the end of the weekend and now my Hebrew studies are back on track. I finished the first six lessons of Assimil. It's very, very slow in the beginning, but I think it will pick up once they have introduced the whole אלפבית.

I haven't found a good prepackaged vocabulary builder for Hebrew that includes the exact pronunciation, but I found a terrific source that can be used to build a vocabulary builder:

https://www.teachmehebrew.com/hebrew-fr ... -list.html

It lists Hebrew words without vowels, but it also has transliterations of all possible pronunciations, with the meaning of each one. This is perfect! I've started making an Anki deck with the Hebrew word and transliterations on one side and the definitions on the other. I'll be able to see a word and know basically what the pronunciation options are. I think this will give me the foundation I need to be able to use vowelless learning tools like Duolingo and Clozemaster.

ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ
I think I sated my curiosity with Inuktitut so I'm done for now. I'll need to return to this wonderful language when I have a free "secondary language" slot in my queue! I also narrowly avoided getting into Turkish (although I'm still considering a quick dabble if I can get a taste of the vowel harmony system without too much vocab grinding) and !Xóõ (not enough resources available).

[Deinonysus]

In my German class, our final project is to give a brief (10-15 minute) presentation in German about an Austro-Hungarian composer (including German expats like Beethoven and Brahms who did most of their composing in Vienna). I was leaning towards Brahms but I ended up deciding on Béla Bartók, who has quickly become one of my favorite composers after I started taking piano lessons and fell in love with his beautiful works for beginners, Mikrokosmos and Gyermekeknek (For Children).

I want to include a very brief lesson on Hungarian pronunciation and grammar, and I also want to make sure that I pronounce any Hungarian names and titles correctly, so that means I get to spend some time studying Hungarian! The presentation is in around a month.

Because I'm holding off on Duolingo Hebrew I think I should be able to work in Hungarian Duolingo and Pimsleur without impacting my Hebrew progress too much. I'll be delaying my progress in Pimsleur Hebrew by a month or two, and Duolingo will cut into my Anki time for Hebrew vocabulary, but since I'm planning to study Hebrew long-term, the setback shouldn't be too major. My Hebrew Assimil and textbook routines will be completely unaffected.

As a side benefit, I'll be scratching my vowel harmony itch, so I shouldn't be tempted by Turkish.

[AML]

עברית

I always theoretically want to learn Hebrew; my parents are fluent and they are friends with many native speakers, so I have plenty of opportunity to practice. I have a new baby daughter who just turned a month old and I'd like her to learn at least conversational Hebrew as well. I'm a false beginner and I already know the writing system and some basic grammar and vocabulary, and due to heavy exposure as a child I can speak with a convincing accent.

Niiiiice. Congrats on going for it. With your background you would also like Teach Me Hebrew and LearnHebrewPod, my two favorite Hebrew resources. Tons of great Hebrew on both.

[Deinonysus]

עברית

I always theoretically want to learn Hebrew; my parents are fluent and they are friends with many native speakers, so I have plenty of opportunity to practice. I have a new baby daughter who just turned a month old and I'd like her to learn at least conversational Hebrew as well. I'm a false beginner and I already know the writing system and some basic grammar and vocabulary, and due to heavy exposure as a child I can speak with a convincing accent.

Niiiiice. Congrats on going for it. With your background you would also like Teach Me Hebrew and LearnHebrewPod, my two favorite Hebrew resources. Tons of great Hebrew on both.

Wow, Teach Me Hebrew looks amazing! I'm surprised I've never heard of it. Thanks for the tip!

I went through the "Hebrew in 3 minutes" videos and it was mostly stuff I already know, but I've heard good things about HebrewPod's listening comprehension exercises and I'm sure I'll be using them eventually.

[Deinonysus]

Magyar

So far (and this is just the very early stages) I'm finding Hungarian slightly harder than Indonesian and a bit easier than Irish.

Like Indonesian, I need to learn almost all of the vocabulary from scratch, so there's a lot of grinding. I think I'll need to get Duolingo skills up to level 4 in order for them to sink in; with a more transparent language, level 3 is fine. This may not sound like a big difference but since each level after the second requires many more repetitions than the previous level, it adds up.

I think the reason I'm not finding Hungarian much harder than Indonesian is that even though the grammar is much more complicated, so far it's nothing I haven't seen before in German: word order is variable and you move words up to emphasize them, which you also do in German. So far only the accusative case has been introduced but so far it works exactly the same as in German and Esperanto. In the words I've seen so far, you just add a "-t" to form the accusative case (plus an extra vowel if the root ends in a consonant).

Good day (EN)
Jó napot (HU)
Bonan tagon (EO)
Guten Tag (DE)

If I didn't already speak with German, I think I would probably have a much harder time with these concepts. I've only encountered one of 18 cases so far, so maybe I'll eat these words later. But I have heard that Hungarian cases aren't as hard as Indo-European cases. Because there are so many of them, their scope is more specific and they basically function like prepositions in other languages.

The reason I'm having an easier time with Hungarian than Irish is probably mostly related to the pronunciation and spelling. Irish spelling has very arcane pronunciation rules, and I had a hard time wrapping my head around the pronunciation even with just audio. But Hungarian is almost completely phonetic and pronunciation feels very comfortable and familiar to me due to resemblances to other languages I've studied. The prosody is very similar to Icelandic, with stress always falling on the first syllable, and the vowel inventory overlaps heavily with German's. I'm familiar with vowel length and gemination contrasts as well. The only difficult consonants are the voiced and voiceless palatal stops gy and ty. "Gy" is particularly common. I've seen it described as the voiced palatal stop /ɟ/, but I'm hearing it as more of a palatalized d or maybe a d combined with a voiced palatal fricative /dʝ/, or even the Japanese J (the voiced alveolo-palatal affricate /dʑ/). Wikipedia describes it as a /ɟʝ/ which is a bit closer to what I'm hearing, but I think it does start with a /d/, not a /ɟ/.

[Deinonysus]

I think I've struck a good balance between Hebrew and Hungarian. I do my Assimil Hebrew lesson most nights so I'm making some progress, and other than that I'm mostly focusing on Hungarian with Pimsleur and Duolingo. I've gotten a bit stuck in Duolingo Hungarian because there's just so much new vocabulary to learn, but I should be able to brute force it just like I did with Indonesian.

Hungarian word order is really messing me up. In a survey of 1,377 languages, WALS lists the four most common orders as SOV (565, or 41% of total), SVO (488, or 35% of total), and no dominant order (189, or 14% of total). These make up 90% of the languages surveyed, and most of the rest are VSO as in Irish and Standard Arabic (98, or 7% of total). Hungarian is listed as having no dominant order (as is German).
https://wals.info/feature/81A#2/18.0/153.1

In a separate map, Hungarian is listed as having the co-dominant values of SOV and SVO. Incidentally, so is German, which is why it isn't that bad for me. But the difference is that I'm very familiar with German and I have a good sense of when SOV order is triggered. With Hungarian, I have no clue when to use which order. I'm sure I'll get it in time. It may have to wait until I have more time and focus to devote to Hungarian.
https://wals.info/feature/81B#3/39.91/3.25

Deutsch
We're getting towards the end of the school year, and this is the highest level of German that's available at the school where I'm working, so this is it! We recently finished learning a long list of verbs that take a particular preposition that isn't intuitive to English speakers, but a lot of that was covered while I was on my first round of parental leave so I want to go over it a bit more to cement it. The class moves slowly but hopefully we will be able to start reading a YA novel about the end of WWII. We will need to go over das Präteritum first, which is covered in the next chapter of our textbook. I hope we can fit it all in!

This class should get me closer to being able to comfortably read German novels. But I think I'll still need much more vocabulary. I'll have a few weeks of parental leave shortly after the semester ends and I'm hoping to make some good headway into memorizing Barron's 501 German Verbs. Once I get the full conjugation patterns of the core verbs (I think there are 50 or so), I should be able to learn the other verbs more quickly and Anki will become a good option because there will be less information to cover for each verb.

[Chung]

Bartók is a fantastic composer. I especially like his piano concertos and "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta".

Just for fun, you can even listen to the master talking about a few of his works in this excerpt of an interview done late in his life.

On Hungarian word order, the general rule is that the focused element of the sentence must immediately precede the conjugated verb. It's probably better to think of it this way than to try to frame it as SOV and SVO. The hard work is learning what constitutes focus as this sometimes depends on the speaker's perception and other times is governed by a set of rules regardless of the speaker's sense of what the focus is.

There's a decent but short chapter introducing word order in "Hungarian: An Essential Grammar" by Rounds. Some of the same material is expounded here which you can read for free and there's also a decent summary on "Hungary for You" separated in four parts: I, II, III and IV. I've found Hungarian word order to be the toughest part of the language to figure out, and often the big giveaway of a foreigner who otherwise gets things right for fluency as seen in idiomatic word choice and inflection by the book.

I've seen threads about Hungarian syntax come up on a few times on the Duolingo forum, but frankly I've found it hard to make sense of them since posts alternate between someone's summary of the subject to reactions from someone else and then associated attempts at clarification in the subsequent reply.

[Deinonysus]

Bartók is a fantastic composer. I especially like his piano concertos and "Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta".

Just for fun, you can even listen to the master talking about a few of his works in this excerpt of an interview done late in his life.

On Hungarian word order, the general rule is that the focused element of the sentence must immediately precede the conjugated verb. It's probably better to think of it this way than to try to frame it as SOV and SVO. The hard work is learning what constitutes focus as this sometimes depends on the speaker's perception and other times is governed by a set of rules regardless of the speaker's sense of what the focus is.

There's a decent but short chapter introducing word order in "Hungarian: An Essential Grammar" by Rounds. Some of the same material is expounded here which you can read for free and there's also a decent summary on "Hungary for You" separated in four parts: I, II, III and IV. I've found Hungarian word order to be the toughest part of the language to figure out, and often the big giveaway of a foreigner who otherwise gets things right for fluency as seen in idiomatic word choice and inflection by the book.

I've seen threads about Hungarian syntax come up on a few times on the Duolingo forum, but frankly I've found it hard to make sense of them since posts alternate between someone's summary of the subject to reactions from someone else and then associated attempts at clarification in the subsequent reply.

Thanks, those sources look great! I'm glad I'm not the only one who found the Duolingo comments about Hungarian word order to be unhelpful.