Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

First the logographic languages: I have never studied one of those so I don't have personal experiences with wordlists in such languages. But if I were to study for instance Mandarin then I would probably have to use Pinyin as a bridge between the logographic signs and the words they refer to, and in all likelihood that would mean that I would choose to operate with 4 or 5 columns instead of just three- or alternatively I would write both the Pinyin and the logo-sign in the same field. After all, how would you indicate that you know the word that hides behind a sign if you can't show it in some way - and that means either Pinyin or IPA. But maybe it's just me who see a problem where the students of Mandarin themselves don't - you could in principle write signs in column 1 and 3 and a translation into some other language in column 2 and skip pinyin totally. I just think it would be too difficult to memorize a sign without having an actual representation of the word it refers to.

When you speak of cards and decks you are thinking in SRS terms (Anki etc.). With wordlists it is just wordlists and repetition sheets. I have already mentioned what I would do with words that for some reason turn out to be unexpectedly troublesome - and my advice is to ignore them, unless the reason is that they are 'grammar words' or other very common words with lots of meanings and uses and maybe even irregular morphology. Such words could be scrutinized during specialized sessions where you find a number of exemples and check them against your best dictionary (and maybe even a grammar). They are not really the right kind of words for wordlists where the goal is to memorize large numbers of fairly simple words. There are also words which for some reason irritate you - and for those my advice is to ignore them. If they are common enough you'll meet them again later, and then you may be better equipped to gulp them down.

One thing more: you don't need to learn all meanings of a complicated word in one fell swoop. Most meanings will be derived from one core meaning (or maybe two or three), and then you can focus on the core meaning(s) and postpone learning the rest. And don't try to learn one hundred almost identical words or words for almost identical entities in one and the same session. Take some now and leave the rest for later.

One advantage of paper dictionaries is that you get whole pages full of words. And then you see not only the ones you have searched for, but also all the others. And the advantage of writing your lists by hand is that at least some of us remember handwritten notes better than typed ones - but for young people who have grown up with a keyboard under their nose that may be different. One advantage of doing the lists in for instance a spreadsheet would be that you could convert them into Anki decks - but I have so far survived not to have that opportunity.

[Sparverius]

First the logographic languages: I have never studied one of those so I don't have personal experiences with wordlists in such languages. But if I were to study for instance Mandarin then I would probably have to use Pinyin as a bridge between the logographic signs and the words they refer to, and in all likelihood that would mean that I would choose to operate with 4 or 5 columns instead of just three- or alternatively I would write both the Pinyin and the logo-sign in the same field. After all, how would you indicate that you know the word that hides behind a sign if you can't show it in some way - and that means either Pinyin or IPA. But maybe it's just me who see a problem where the students of Mandarin themselves don't - you could in principle write signs in column 1 and 3 and a translation into some other language in column 2 and skip pinyin totally. I just think it would be too difficult to memorize a sign without having an actual representation of the word it refers to.

This is my biggest problem with using actual flash cards/word lists, yeah. While the characters and the pronunciation are related, going directly from L1->character removes information and it's hard to include each piece of information in such a way that it's not a massive hassle. The reason I use Anki is basically entirely this-- it allows me to go between the word as written and the translation in both directions, while always having the pronunciation present. Initially, I tried carrying around pencil and paper to write down the character when practicing (which I think would be more effective all things being equal), but then discovered the whiteboard feature that allows you to write the character on the screen of your phone, allowing all of these things to happen in one small package I usually keep in my pocket that also has dictionaries and all.



There are several advantages to a written-out method that I do miss, though. The manual nature of writing down as opposed to typing up has been pretty clearly shown (with students taking notes in classes) to lead to higher levels of recall. Furthermore, there's a certain amount of flexibility you give up with Anki-- it's designed to give you cards in increasing intervals until you've mastered them, and you can't just decide "I've learned enough for this group to be relevant, I'm going to move on" without messing around a lot deleting or suspending cards (I'm aware there are enough variable settings to approximately replicate something like your method but that's too much work for me to do on a regular basis). It also has the upside of not requiring staring at a screen, which I already do more than enough of.

I'll check back in after hopefully giving dictionary wordlists a go with German, thanks for the patience and feedback.

[Iversen]

To Sparverius: Good luck with the experiment.

Today I went to the weekly language café at our main library, and it seems that the number of partipants at long langs is showing signs of creeping upwards again. Most of the time the Anglophone table had five participants, while I spoke Spanish to a couple of ladies who were learning it through evening courses - and considering this, they were actually quite good. But after an hour an so they showed signs of tiredness (they were probably never supposed to say so much in their class envirmonts).

When one of the ladies said that Spanish was very irregular I first said that the most irregular thing in Spanish was the indefinido - but they hadn't learnt that yet. In contrast, things like "dormir" - "duermo" might look like irregularities, but they were actually caused by a regular rule. These sound changes may still be somewhat complicated, but strictly speaking they aren't irregularities - just a damned nuisance to newbee learners. And then one lady said that Polish might be even more complicated, probably because she knew that the other lady was born in Poland but came to Denmark as a child. Then we spoke for a while about Polish morphology, including things like the double endings of the past tense and the weird fact that the accusative singular of masculine nouns takes its forms either from the nominative or the genitive, depending on whether it is animated or not. It turned out that the Polish lady had even noticed this, but then I asked her to translate sentences akin to "the car moves - I see the car" versus "the horse moves - I see the horse" (samochód się porusza - widzę samochód versus koń rusza się - widzę konia) - and then suddenly she noticed that the accusative horse now had got a genitive-like ending. So clearly she knew how to use the Polish language (far better than me), but she hadn't thought about its mechanics before now.

After an hour the Mexican lady I have mentioned earlier joined us, and I had to ask her to speak slower for the sake of the ladies, who clearly had trouble understanding her. As I said they were already were somewhat tired, and they left shortly after. But then it turned out that the Mexican lady actually had come to speak German. GER: Gut, dann haben wir deutsch so ungefähr eine Stunde gesprochen über Dinger wie z.B. die 'Welterbe-Listen' von Unesco - also: was gibt's in Mexico, und was gibt's hier in Dänemark -SP y después sobre las condiciones económicas de los estudiantes en México y en Dinamarca. GER: Und wir konnten glücklicherweise beide blitzschnell sprechen, was mir sehr gefällt - also fragte ich sie, wo sie so gut Deutsch gelernt habe. Und entgegen meiner Erwartung sagte sie, daß sie es in Mexiko gelernt hat - nicht in Deutschland. Was zu eine Diskussion über die Mennoniten in Lateinamerika (derunter Mexico) und ihren Plautdietschen Mundart gegenüber die Plattdüütsche Sprache die angeblich in Norddeutschland gesprochen wird - obwohl ich sie niemals dort gesprochen gehört habe - und von dort weiter zu die Unterschieden zwischen die hochdeutsche Dialekten in verschiedenen Teilen Deutschlands (dh. Tschüß versus Grüß Gott).

EN: I don't normally spend my time in bars, not even during holidays, so I really don't know whether an average conversation in an average bar takes you through a similar range of topics, but I know that when we are just enough people these language cafés are good not only for training our languages, but also for getting out into the nooks and crannies of each language. And you don't have to buy expensive drinks, and there is no irritating music noise in the background.

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[DaveAgain]

I was watching a doccy about monasteries earlier, it included a mention of an Anglo-saxon book, the winchester troper, that included a form of musical notation allowing the songs/chants to be sung by two voices.

https://www.pbsamerica.co.uk/series/sai ... ries/#5529

https://www.bl.uk/anglo-saxons/articles ... on-england

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winchester_Troper

I thought it might interest you.

[Iversen]

Ancient music systems definitely interest me. In December 2019 I wrote a short passage in Latin about neumes in my history of Western music, and here i wrote that this notation system indicated directions (rather than precise intervals), but not at all durations. So any realization of the old melodies must be tentative. I have also mentioned an old Russian system (based on a system from Byzantium), which is equally opaque to modern scholars. But even today there are guitarists who swear to a system that indicates chords, but not the precise notes that make up a given chord, so the use of grossly deficient notation systems is not a thing of the past.

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I have been away on family trip for a few days, and during this short time the corona/covid pandemy situation has escalated to the point where our government has chosen to close all educational and cultural institutions for (so far) 14 days. I'm glad that I did my travel through Southern India in late February and early march - it would not have been possible today. And next week I had planned to visit some aquariums and a rainforest and several museums and the library - but all these are closed, so I'll have lots of time to study. And travelling abroad now would be tantamount to asking for trouble, if not downright impossible.

At least I haven't been put into home quarantine, but this has happened to others simply because they had been close to somebody who had returned from for instance Ischgl in Austria or Northern Italy - and then you are in principle not even allowed to leave your home to buy food. And if you feel the least bit sick then you are told to stay at home, but unless you are really ill you can't expect to be tested - you just have to stay at home and suffer in silence. But it could be even worse: several Danish tourists were confined to their hotel rooms of Tenerife just because an Italian guest who stayed at the same hotel was diagnosed with corona. And I guess they couldn't even understand the programs on their TV set so it must have been an extraordinarily boring experience.

During the aforementioned family visit I had brought along Assimil's Occitan course, but it didn't appeal to me. I prefer getting my information in a much more concentrated and systematic fashion. Instead I did some Latin wordlists - long ago I once gave my mother a Latin-Danish dictionary as a present because she then could check some of the more recalcitrant words in her crosswords, and now I had the opportunity to use it myself.

[Iversen]

It has been discussed whether people could read in their dreams, and it has even been suggested that this ability could be used as a criterion for discovering that you have a lucid dream. But this morning I woke up from a dream where I had not only to read music, but also to play the violin (which I stopped doing more than twenty years ago). I was standing in something that looked like a railway station opposite a group of musicians, and they urged me in English to play the second violin part. OK, then I got the sheets, and I had to follow the notes - but for some reason the others stopped playing when I grabbed the violin, and then I had to play my part alone - maybe as a test or something. I made some errors, but corrected them by looking in the notes once more (I have forgotten which piece we were rehearsing). And I would not even categorize this dream as clearly lucid, so it should be a sign that reading music in an ordinary dream isn't totally impossible.

As for reading ordinary written stuff in a dream it happens fairly often for me, but only with short snippets of up to a sentence or two - never a whole page. But for me it is clear that claiming that you can't read in a dream is nonsense - the only caveat is that you of course have provided the text yourself, but as text, not just as some smudge on a piece of paper.

Today I have been to town and worked on my music collection, but I have also added to my Latin wordlist and watched TV in a number of languages. On Danish television there is mostly programs about the corona situation, and I'm sick and tired of listening to that stuff - especially the uninformative and banal effusions of journalists being interviewed by other journalists and the same press briefings repeated again and again. The situation for me right now is that I can walk freely around and buy stuff in the shops and use public transport, but I have little reason to leave my home town since all cultural institutions are closed - and I couldn't leave the country if I wanted to, but right now that isn't my main concern. At least the internet still functions ...

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[jeff_lindqvist]

It has been discussed whether people could read in their dreams, and it has even been suggested that this ability could be used as a criterion for discovering that you have a lucid dream. But this morning I woke up from a dream where I had not only to read music, but also to play the violin (which I stopped doing more than twenty years ago).

Two nights ago I had a dream (or two) where I played guitar (a tune of my own), and also read a poem in Irish aloud. It had rhymes and all that. I didn't know the meaning, nor did the person next to me (whoever that was; I always meet people who don't exist other than in that certain dream).

[Iversen]

GER: Ich könnte jetzt schreiben, daß ich den ganzern Tag auf meine Sprachen gearbeitet habe ... aber nein, ich habe tatsächlich meiner Musiksammlung mehr Zeit gewidmet als dem Sprachenlernen. Ich hatte zuvor noch eine große Aufgabe vor mir, nämlich die Themen aufzuschreiben, und mit ein Bissel Glück kann ich das noch hier in März schaffen - und danach gibt's nur noch lauschen, lauschen, lauschen bis ich als alter Mann in meinem Schaukelstuhl sitze und nix anderes tun kann.

Aber auch wenn ich am Rechner sitze und arbeite kann ich Fern gucken und habe darunter auch ganz viel Deutsches Fernsehen gesehen, so wie Sendungen aus Zoologische Gärten, haha. Tatsächlich waren die Zoos einige von die letzten Kulturinstitutionen hier im Lande die offen waren weil sie unter freiem Himmel meistens sind (vorausgesetzt daß die 'Häußer' unzugänglich gemacht werden), aber jetzt sind sie wohl auch geschlossen - und alles weil es Schlangen gibt und Terror-Idioten, die nicht verstehen können, daß man zurzeit Abstand halten muß (und zu Hause bleiben, wenn man hustet).

Ich vermute, daß es weniger neue Fernsehprogramme gerade jetzt gedreht werden (außer Nachrichtensendungen und Dokus über die Corona) - und definitiv keine Neuaufnahmen mit Publikum. Stattdessen sieht man Bilder aus einer ganz anderen Welt, wo die Leute frei herumrennen und Reisen machen könnten - darunter auch Werbung für Reiseveranstalter und so was. Ich hatte das Glück, vom Ende Januar bis eine Woche in Februar nach Indien reisen zu können - und ich bin zurückgereist gerade wenn der erste Fall in Kerala gemeldet wurde. Jetzt weiß niemand, wann die Grenzen wieder offen werden - und welche Reiseveranstalter und transportfirmen es dann immer noch gibt.

Und bis dann kann ich dann weiter anachronistischer Fernsehsendungen angucken, wo man zum Beispiel Dinger wie diese hört:

"Schöne Gegend - da kann man eigentlich toll eine ganze Ferien machen" (ahem, zur Zeit nicht)

"Irgendwann brennt er aus .. man sieht es an seine Augen.. seine schweißige Stirn" (schon schlimmer, aber wenn die Sendung gedreht wurde, gab es wohl noch keine corona - und es war klar, daß damit eher die Stimmungslage des Mannes gemeint wurde)

IT: Ma ovviamente guardo anche la TV in altre lingue, inclusi vecchi programmi dall'Italia, dalla Spagna, dalla Francia e dal Belgio (l'ultimo nuovo paese a imporre il coprifuoco), dove in realtà c'erano persone per strada, e la gente si sedeva attorno ai tavoli con aria felice mentre mangiava i piatti regionali con vino del paese - quel tipo di programmi. Oggi ... l'ultima cosa da Italia che ho visto (in una trasmissione della televisione danese) riguardava una famiglia che viveva insieme in un appartamento che non potevano lasciare perché tre di loro avevano la malattia. Altri membri della famiglia portavano loro del cibo attraverso un molo che fu issato a livello della strada. Infatti una sorella della protagonista era morta, ma durava parecchie giorni prima che persone in tuta spaziale arrivassero e portassero via il corpo. Una scena come da un film horror!

NO: For noen dager siden så jeg et program fra Norge om en folkgruppe i Nordnorge som snakket en slags finsk ved navn Kvensk. De norske myndigheter hadde aktivt forsøkt å utrydde språket, og det var noen hårreisende historier fra skolesystemet om barn der ble straffet, hvis de talte 'finsk' på skolan. Og i dag snakkes kvensk stort sett kun av eldre borgere - knapt noen under 60 år - så det vil sannsynligvis dø snart. Eg husker imidlertid at eg engang var der oppe og kom gjennom et sted som heter Kvænangen - er det kanske en forbindelse her? Men faktisk snakket eg ikke med noen i sjølva Kvænangen - se bildet.

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[tractor]

NO: For noen dager siden så jeg et program fra Norge om en folkgruppe i Nordnorge som snakket en slags finsk ved navn Kvensk. De norske myndigheter hadde aktivt forsøkt å utrydde språket, og det var noen hårreisende historier fra skolesystemet om barn der ble straffet, hvis de talte 'finsk' på skolan. Og i dag snakkes kvensk stort sett kun av eldre borgere - knapt noen under 60 år - så det vil sannsynligvis dø snart. Eg husker imidlertid at eg engang var der oppe og kom gjennom et sted som heter Kvænangen - er det kanske en forbindelse her? Men faktisk snakket eg ikke med noen i sjølva Kvænangen - se bildet.

Ja, ifølge Norsk stadnamnleksikon har stedet navnet etter folkegruppa kvener. Sisteleddet -angen er fra gammelnorsk angr, som betyr fjord. Navn som slutter på -angen eller -anger er vanlige langs kysten.

Kvensk skal språklig ligne veldig på tornedalsfinsk (meänkieli) i Sverige.

Norske myndigheter forsøkte å utrydde både samisk og kvensk. I perioder så man med stor bekymring på at deler av befolkningen i Nord-Norge var kvensk- eller finskspråklig. Dette gjaldt særlig under fremveksten av den finske Lappo-bevegelsen og tanken om et Stor-Finland.

https://snl.no/kvener

[Iversen]

I have still not quite finished the collection project, but today I spent three hours walking (minus some time taking the bus to suitable walking areas), and I have also worked on a Bulgarian text about irregular measures in music. As for the walk I can do it without getting close to other people (sometimes down to one meter when I pass by others, but optimally at least two meters), and the busses and streets are so empty now that I always can avoid close proximity to others there. In Copenhagen it seems that there are some stubborn obtuse persons around who simply ignore the rules, and there have also been cases of large groups there (anything beyond 10 persons is against the rules now, and you can in principle be fined for being within such a group) - but here in my town people seems to have grasped the message, and I seriously hope that the irresponsable behaviour of a few terrorists won't provoke our government into imposing a general house arrest as in other countries like Italy, Spain, France, Belgium and now also Bavaria in Germany. That would rob me of one of the few (still) legal activities, apart from sleeping, eating, going to the loo, working on my computer and studying Bulgarian texts about musical metrics.

BU: По-голямата част от бароковата и класическата музика е написана в двучастичен (или четир-частичен) или в три-частичен ритъм, но в по-новата класическа музика започват да проникват други видове ритъм. На Балканите обаче те винаги са били нормални и докато все още се композира, аз бях повлиян от тези нередовни ритми - вижте по-долу примери от сюита за две флейти и виолончело. По онова време още свирих виолончело, но най-положителното беше, че двамата флейтисти нямаха проблеми да научат гласа си. Могат да се разграничат четири вида ритми: прост (2/4, 3/4, 4/4), прост но все още редовен (5/4, 7/4), неправилен и напълно анархичен. В абзаца по-долу има осем метрума във всеки удар, но разпределението на тях в групи от два и групи от три удара варира.

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