Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby David1917 » Wed Jun 19, 2019 2:24 pm

I'm very interested to hear more about your impressions of Lvov and the rest of Ukraine (did you go to Odessa, too? One of my favorite cities in the world). Did you eat chocolate and drink coffee? Whenever I told someone anywhere else in Ukraine that I was going to Lvov, the first reply would always be "ah Lvov, yes, make sure to eat some chocolate!" And so I did. In fact, I had 3 cups of coffee in one day because my host/guide really wanted me to try all the different options - and one was even an espresso with a bit of chocolate on top!
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Jun 19, 2019 6:38 pm

As for the driverless trains I do know the system from metros (including the one in Copenhagen), but I have never heard about driverless intercity trains. And that's silly since train drivers have so little to do that they have been equipped with a button which they have to press at regular intervals continuously to prove that they still are alive.

And Lviv .. well, I only had two nights and roughly 1½ day for tourism. I arrived around noon from Bratislava, too early to check into my hotel, so the first thing I did was to head for the tourist information in a big white building on the main square. And there I bought a Lviv card, which wasn't worth the money. It is valid for trams and trolley busses, but not for the busses, and it is only valid for some museums like for instance the historical museum right across from the tourist information, but not for the three museums at the backside of the building. Besides museum tickets are so cheap (especially for 65+) that you just pay up even if you have a card - it is easier than checking the booklet that followed with the card. Apart from that I enjoyed the town, and I visited a lot of museums and churches during my short stay. The whole town center has been declared a Unesco world heritage, and it is worth the accolade. Which brings me to the subject of chocolate: no I didn't have any chocolate. I had two pizzas at a place near the central square, and I bought dairy products and cookies from some of the small supermarkets which I could gobble down between museum visits. That's all I need - no fancy restaurants, no tea, not coffee and no booze for me. And sorry, no Odessa - but I visited Kiev almost twenty years ago..

RU: В деревне к югу от Львова есть большой зоопарк "Лимпопо", но в городе есть только один маленький зоопарк. Я пытался найти его, но попытка не удалась. В туристической информации мне сказали, чтобы сесть на трамвай 4 от определенного места. Я там долго ждал, но трамвай 4 не пришел. Затем я вернулся к информации, и новая женщина мне сказала, что номера изменились - теперь это был трамвай 8. Я поехал на этом трамвае в правильное место, но сделал ошибку: я спросил местную женщину о направлениях, и она указала дальше на юг. А потом я попал в лес, и время истекло для меня, чтобы я никогда не видел миниатюрный зоопарк Львова. Кроме того, я видел все, что планировал. И я нашел украинско-английский словарь.

PO: Przepraszam za poprzednią część jest napisaną po rosyjsku - jeszcze nie nauczyłem się ukraińskiego, ale przynajmniej mam teraz słownik.

F5929a01_girl from lviv (behind the opera).jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Jun 21, 2019 11:05 am

Today's tale will be about boys and laziness and the number of people who claim to speak Esperanto.

I'm in the process of doing the 29+ wordlists in different languages, and a few minutes ago I just did the last repetitions on my lists in Germanic languages. Of course I can't cover ALL Germanic languages from all periods - for lack of dictionaries I have to leave things like Frisian and ancient forms like Anglosaxon and Gothic out, but I have made lists in standard English, Scots, Afrikaans, Dutch, Low and High German, Icelandic, Norwegian and Swedish with somewhere between 60 and 70 words on each list, and I have done the first repetition round. So when I have finished writing this message I shall proceed through Irish to the Romance and Slavic languages, Greek, Albanian, Esperanto, Finnish and - as the only non-European item - Bahasa Indonesia. The Norwegian list started out in New Norwegian, but due to an lamentable lack of dictionary support I have switched to Bokmål, which is the variant most Norwegians use. And it turned out that there actually are lots of funny words even in this variant so I don't feel I have sold out to the majority variant - but I still find New Norwegian more fun to read. More about that below. But first a bit of statistics about Esperanto.

EO: Mi ĵus riĉevis la revuon "Esperanto" per poŝto, kaj ĉe la fino estas artikolo demandanta pri la nombro de parolantoj de Esperanto. La metodo baziĝas ĉefe sur Facebook kiu ĝis 2016 publikigis la nombron de uzantoj, kiuj deklaris ke ili parolus Esperanton - kaj due: sur informoj pri retaj lerno-rimedoj kiel Lernu.net. La takso estas de ĉirkaŭ du milionoj da Esperantuloj (inkluzive 1000-2000 gehomoj, kiuj havas la lingvon kiel sian gepatran lingvon - kvankam malprobable kiel la unua aŭ sola gepatra lingvo). Sed oni devas preni ĉi tio rezulto kun multaj rezervoj, kaj la artikolo klare klarigas ĉi tiujn problemojn. Unue, nur kvarono de la monda populacio finis en la ventro de la ĉiumanĝanta Moloch. Due, nur 16% indikis, ke ili regas Esperanton (kaj ĉu vi povas fidi je ĉi tiu indiko?), sed oni taksas pri la nombro de ne-subskribintaj parolantoj komparante la lingvon kun aliaj lingvoj por kiuj ekzistas pli da informfontoj. Trie: la nombro de membroj de la malnovmodaj asocioj, inkluzive de UEA, ĝenerale malpliiĝas, sed kun la alveno de interretaj edukado-portaloj, individuoj kapablas lerni la lingvon ekster la tradiciaj edukaj ejoj kaj sen iu ajn eltrovas ilin.

Ĉu vere ekzistas du milionoj da homoj en la mondo kiuj kapablas paroli Esperanton? Mi vere malkredas, sed eble estas du milionoj da homoj, kiuj iam en iu momento komencis lerni ĝin - sed neniu scias kiun ili eniris kun la studojn. Eble ili povas legi kaj kompreni tekstojn (se ili povas trovi ion ajn), sed ĉu ili vere povas paroli ĝin laŭ sufiĉe prudenta nivelo? Mi dubas - ankaŭ pro mia propra sperto. Mi povas paroli la lingvon sed ne sen kelkaj minutoj avizo kaj ne se mi aŭdas aliajn lingvojn ĉirkaŭ mi. Kaj mi ne estas en Facebook, do mi ne ekzistas.

EN: And now for a wee rant about some Nordic words. On a runic stone which was found in the wall of a church in my home town you can read the following text:

Translitteration:
(-)usti : auk : hufi : auk : þiR : frebiurn : risþu : stin : þąnsi : eftiR : | : ąsur : saksa : filaka : sin : harþa : kuþan : trik : saR : tu : | : mana : mest : uniþikR : | saR : ati : skib : miþ : arną :

Transskription:
Tōsti ok Hōfi ok þēR Frøbiorn rēsþu stēn þannsi æftiR Assur Saksa, fēlaga sinn, harða gōðan dræng. SāR dō manna mæst[r] ūnīðingR, sāR ātti skip með Arna.

English translation:
Tosti and Hofi and Freybjǫrn, they raised this stone in memory of Ǫzurr Saxon / Sword(-wielder), their partner, a very good "drengr". He died as the most unvillainous of men; he owned a ship with Arni.

The word "Drengr" has had a very different fate in the modern Nordic languages. In Danish it now only signifies a young boy, and this meaning determines the interpretation even of derivations like "drengerøv" (i.e. an irresponsible youngster, literally boy-ass - who in practice can be of any age). In contrast, Icelandic words like "drengilegur" (decent, noble) and "drengskaparorð" (word of honour) still reflect the original meaning. The word "drengur" alone does however signify 'boy' now (with "strákur" as its main competitor), possibly due to Danish influence. In Norwegian the word "dreng" has come to signify a farm hand, regardless of age, and boys are mostly called "gutter" (or "gutta" in New Norwegian). The same applies to Swedish, where "dräng" similarly has come to mean a farm hand, while boys are referred to as "pojkar" or "killar",

Another funny word in Norwegian is "dovning", which according to my dictionary can mean EITHER a lazy person OR a member of a labour group who lend people a hand for free - i.e. two quite irreconcilable meanings. In Danish the word is not used anymore, but it had the same two conflicting meanings in old Danish. According to the "Ordbog over det danske sprog" the first meaning is a simple derivation of the adjective "doven" (lazy) (or maybe the verb "at dovne" - to be lazy), while the second meaning was derived from the verb "at du" (roughly 'to function', 'to be good at something') - but mainly used about Norwegian habits ... so when we were separated from Norway in 1814 we dropped this second meaning. Maybe Danes just didn't fancy working for free.

To be lazy in Danish can also be expressed as "at drive (den af)". And again Norwegian has something funny to show, namely the word "drivende" which in my dictionary from Paludan is explained in the following terms: "(adjective) rask, ivrig, energisk". "Drivende vær" is weather that is optimal for some purpose, like agriculture or sailing. In Swedish "drive på med" means 'to continue doing something', and even in Danish we can "drive en forretning" (ie. run a business") or "drive folk til vanvid" (drive people mad) - but we can't *drive a car (we "kører bil"). All these expressions show an activity level above zero, but when we use "drive" alone in a sentence we lie down and refuse to do anything. Like the man on the painting below..

Kunst044.JPG
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Jun 22, 2019 8:52 pm

I visited a neighbour town called Grenå yesterday ... ahemn, it was renamed Grenaa by some local politicians who didn't realize that 'aa' will be pronounced exactly like "å" by all foreigners (i.e. like a flat long /aaaaaaaa/ - except by the Swedes who know how to pronounce the letter 'å'). In the excellent museum there I saw an old picture where it was spelled "Greenaae" - maybe I'll start writing its name like that just to mock the Greenaayieanss. But in this museum I saw for the first time in a Danish museum a text that accepted the new facts about an invasion by Asiatic steppe people around 2800 BC and suggested that they also brought along the precursor(s) of the Indoeuropean languages. And it added some interesting facts.

It seems that the agriculturers from the time just before the invasion got visitors from Sweden who taught them to kill bears and fish and hunt aurochses and kill/sacrifice even more bears if they could find them - and then maybe slack a wee bit on all that boring agriculture thing. Maybe those neolitic Djurslanders agreed that porridge isn't nearly as delicious as a good roast or a grilled fish, but anyway, they lived happily for some 200 years with their new eating habits until the arrival of the Yamnaya - and then they suddenly disappeared (pouff!)..

The funny thing is that the steppe invaders apparently didn't immediately colonize the peninsula so the most likely explanation is an epidemy brought along by the Asian invaders. Faithful readers of this thread may remember that I some time ago mentioned that the pest arrived in Europe with the Yamnaya, but the fact that the local population of the Danish peninsula Djursland - my neighbours! - suddenly disappeared from the face of the Earth even though the new people from the East didn't even settle on their territory was new to me. In fact Djursland remained desolate for around 300 years, and after that time it was repopulated by people with a large proportion of Yamnaya genes.

F5933b07_Greenaae_Museum.jpg


Djursland.jpg

I also visited a 1700-century festival at the manor house museum 'Old Estrup', so there hasn't been much time for studying today - only a couple of wordlists in Irish and Latin...
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Mon Jun 24, 2019 10:09 pm

I did my two triple-columns of Irish wordlists (around 30 words) and after that the Romance languages, from Latin over her daughters Old and New (written) French, Portuguese, Castilian, Catalan, Italian and Romanian, and after that Albanian and Greek. Now I'm going to do a couple of days of tourism in the Northern part of Jutland, and I intend to bring along those wordlist so that I in principle could do the repetitions tomorrow evening, and after that I'll continue with the Slavic languages, Esperanto, Indonesian and Finnish - and maybe a couple more, just for fun.

You may think that it is totally ridiculous to do anything in thirty languages, and to boot something as nerdy as wordlists, but when you first get the flow going then it is actually quite entertaining in its own quiet and unalarmist way. And I have listened through most of Mahlers symphonies and watched television while doing the lists, so I have actually been quite well entertained.

As usual there were some things that struck me, like the claim that a "dottore" in Italy doesn't have to have written a dissertation for the doctorate as in for instance the Anglosaxon world or Germany - or Denmark for that matter. So in Italy I could call myself "dottore" if I wanted, but I won't because I have grown up in a country where you first write a dissertation that pleases a select corps of censors, and THEN you get the right to that overglorified title. The funny thing is that it actually was at the university in Bologna in Italy that the top notch level of university teachers first stopped being called 'masters' (or "maistre" in my Ancient French dictionary) and become doctors instead. But here in Denmark outside the academical world few people really care about doctorates and other academical titles, so I haven't spent my time on writing such a dissertation. By the way, doctors of medicine are also required to write dissertations, but I have seen some of them and they were TINY compared to the gargantuan volumes written by aspiring dr.phil.'s (doctores philosophiae). And in fact any person who has passed the final medical degree and become a 'læge' will be called a doctor by his/her patients, just as in the Anglosaxon world.

By the way, congratulations to dr. Cavesa for passing that hurdle.

There is one more funny thing about doctors in France, namely that the medieval word "ès" (= en les) has been conserved in this context - and only there: "docteur ès lettres" or "ès science" or ès whatever.

In many places including Italy it seems that the general population has looked in a slightly condescending way at the academical world as a whole - witness words for it as "Dottorame", which in my dictionary is marked as "spreg(iativo)", and a tendency to give all words that denote learnedness the connotation of pedantry, boredom and didacticalness in a tiresome way.

It all started out so very well with the Latin verb "doceo" (docui, doctum, docēre), that meant 'teach' in any way - with no hint of boredom or irritation from the learner. Actually the good pupil was supposed to be "docilis" ... but then vox populi undermined the original meaning so in the modern Romance languages it vacillates between the meaning of being a quick and studious learner and being slow and dull (cfr. "docile" in the Anglosaxon world). And the word "doctrine" has fared even worse: originally it simply meant teaching in general, the special topics taught and/or learnedness in general. But then it came to be associated with the church, and ... well, you know the rest.

FR: cet après-midi j'ai visité notre bibliothèque municipal DOkk1, où il y a chaque lundi un soi-disant 'sprogcafé' (café des langues). Le problème c'est qu'il y a rarement plus que deux ou trois personnes là, et le resultat inévitable, c'est qu'on tend a parler en Anglais. Personellement je n'ai pas participé pour plus d'un mois, surtout à cause de mon voyage a Bratislave et ses environs, mais aujourd'hui il y avait une jeune dame là qui venait de finir ses études de la langue française à l'université et qui était prête à parler en français, mais il y avait aussi un jeune homme qui après un an d'enseignement dans la lycée ne pouvait guère dire deux mot consécutifs en français - et pas tellement de mots en Anglais non plus. OK, on a parlé Anglais (plus un peu de danois), mais après une demi-heure il a trouvé que c''était pas tellement amusant pour lui, et j'ai pu parler une heure et demi avec la jeune dame. L'un des thèmes était évidemment ses études universitaires et la situation lamentable des langues marginales soit en France, soit dans le departement des 'Arts' à l'université ('Arts' en Anglais est le nome du secteur où l'on trouve aujourd'hui les pauvres restes de l'enseigment universitaire ès langues au Danemark).

Elle avait écrit son thèse sur la question des minorités linguistiques en France, et quand j'ai mentionné l'arpitan je fus totalement stupéfait qu'elle sache rien du tout sur ce thème arcanique. Connue aussi comme "franco-provençal" c'était une langue parlée au sud-est de l'Hexagone, nommé aussi l'Arpetanie.

Après mon retour au foyer j'ai évidemment recherché sur internet des signes de vie de l'Arpitan, et il semble qu'il aie encore quelques rare braises parmi les cendres, comme un institut dans une ville nommée Âbèro d’Avâl. Et évidemment il y a aussi une version de Wikipedia dans l'Arpetan, et je ne puis résister la temptation de citer la description de la langue qu'on trouve là - mais c'est très courte, et la Vouiquipèdia arpetane est en général une des plus pauvres en contenu que j'aie jamais vu. Voici le texte en Arpétan:

L’arpetan Prononciation du titre dans sa version originale est na lengoua romana. Son cârro lengouistico d’ora (l’Arpetania) s’èpate dessus três Ètats: la France, la Suisse et l’Étalia. L’ôtonimo « arpetan » ou ben « arpitan » est lo nom per loquint los Arpetans dèsignont lor lengoua. Por la Suisse romanda, la lengoua est sovent asse-ben nomâye « romand ». A la suita de la politica francêsa, la parola « patouès » ou ben « patês » est étot empleyêe, mas el at un’origina pèj·orativa. Des côps, nos povens asse-ben liére la parola « lengoua d’ouè ». La dèfinicion "franco-provenzale" est un ègzonimo balyê per lo mondo lengouistico qu’est patouesiê (prod rârament) a quârques côps litèrâlament en « francoprovençâl ».

Et non, je n'ai même pas envie à faire de listes de mots pour l'Arpetan. C'est trop près à mourir, et je n'ai pas de dictionaires.

Vieillard_francais.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Wed Jun 26, 2019 7:33 pm

When I visited the main library in my town Monday I brought back home the only Japanese textbook they had on their shelves, one published by the Danish editor Akademisk forlag. Bah. Maybe they have others which just have been borrowed by eager learners, but this one was worthless for one very common reason: it gives a word or expression and a 'pretty' translation, which according to my earlier definition is telling you what a person would have said in your base language in the same situation where a person speaking your target language uttered the word or word combination in his/her native language. But it didn't tell me what exactly each sentence or expression meant when spoken/written IN JAPANESE.

So where are you heading as a language learner? If your goal is to think and write and speak directly in the target language then you should develop your internal brain network so that it reflects the target language as closely as possible. If on the other hand your goal is to formulate all sentences in your own language and then translate them into the target language one by one then you are a fool good luck to you.

OK, you want to think/speak/write directly in your target language, why then waste time on a book that doesn't tell you as exactly as possible how the words and sentences and idioms etc in the target language are structured? I have just returned from a two-day trip to some places in Northern Jutland, where I have visited one zoo, one aquarium, seven museums, three libraries, one hotel, three railway stations and half a dozen supermarkets, so there wasn't much time for studying ... but when I left home I grabbed my "Kauderwelsch Japanisch Wort für Wort" (in German) and then I read the first 45 pages (about a third) in the train back home. I could have read more, but then I came to see the (romanized) sentence "hai-tte mo il desu ka?", which was translated literally as "hereinkommend auch gut ist?" and freely as "Darf ich hereinkommen?". And here is the point: BOTH these translations are necessary, but there are misled prophets out there who claim that literal translations are naughty and ugly and that you should focuse solely on the 'pretty' translation. The latter may cover the 'meaning' (read 'gist'), but it is the former that tells you how the Japanese actually think (including the position of the verb).

Japanese is so different from Standard Western Europeanese that you really can see the wheels turning differently from what you are used to, but the phenomenon is of course also know from languages within the big happy Indoeuropean family. When the Russians utter things like "У меня есть небольшая немецкая книга", language teachers expect you to translate this as "I've got a small German book" - but what the Russians really say is something like "At (or by) me is small German book" - and you have to adopt that pattern to be able to think the Russian way.

And no, I'm not going to learn Japanese - at least not before I can buy a handheld thingy that can transcribe written Japanese into something less gruesome (and back again). But it is interesting to have a peek at its inbuilt mechanisms and study the combinatorics behind them.

Kunst089.JPG


RO: Următoarea mea sarcină o să fie să fac repetările listelor mele de cuvinte în șapte limbi românești plus albaneza și greaca modernă.
BU: И тогава започвам кръга със славянските езици (включително украинския език).
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Thu Jun 27, 2019 9:04 pm

Now the repetitions of the wordlists for the Romance language plus Greek and Albanian are in the box, and I have written a new wordlist with around 180-190 words in Ukrainean so that it can be added painlessly into my megawordlistomanic extravaganza, part three (the part with the Slavic languages, Esperanto, Indonesian and Finnish). In case anybody is interested in the system I'll run through the main guidelines:

First round: Three-column wordlists have three columns: no 1 and 3 for the target language and no 2 for the base language. Words are learned in groups of 5-9 because it is important to stop repeating them in your mind, and thinking of other words is a good way to achieve this. Column 1 is taken (one block at a time) from somewhere, in this case a dictionary, and column 2 for that block is added when and only when I can do it with looking in the original source. Column 3 is added when I can cover column 1 and write all the original words from it in one fell swoop without cheating. When one block is finished I continue to the next one.

Round two: repetitions can be done in several ways. If the words come from a text I now tend to check that I have learnt them by reading the text slowly through again. But my current multlingual campaign is based on dictionaries because that is faster. And then I do my repetitions with just two columns: I copy the translations from column 2 to a new sheet, group by group (but not necessarily the original groups) and I then add the second column (one group at a time) when and only when I can write down all the original target language words in one go without cheating.

With my size of handwriting I can have 3 triple columns of each around 25-35 words in one half sheet (I always fold my A4 sheets to make them more manageable), i.e. around 90 words (with translations) per halfpage, and when I have reached the finish with Finnish I have done 6 triple columns in each of 30 languages, which adds up to at least 5400 words. The repetitions obviously take up less space, but the number of words is of course the same.

And no, I don't expect to be able to rattle all 5400 words off me like a stone age tape recorder. But I now have seen them and will probably be able to recognize and understand them if I see them again, and - maybe the most important aspect - I have been through all my languages plus a few possible future ones and done something in each of them - which in itself is a useful thing. And even in the most wellknown of them there are small surprises.

For instance δόρυ in Greek (dory) means speer, and long ago someone named Praxiteles made a famous statue of a man carrying a speer, i.e. a δορυφόρος (doryforos), but this meaning has apparently been lost in all languages including Greek - though not until someone had named a pesky little insect after it so now the potato gobbling reddish-yellow pest known as the colorado beetle is called doryphoros (or a variant of it) in several languages. But there is more: it seems that in the Anglosaxon world it has acquired a new meaning, namely that of a pedantic human being who for some reason derives an immense pleasure from finding spelling/grammatical errors made by others, for instance on the social media. The corresponding adjective would be "doryphoric" -but actually I haven't not seen either word used with this new meaning anywhere so maybe it just was a passing fad in some limited social circles.

Wordlist-Ukrainian.jpg
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby naim » Thu Jun 27, 2019 11:59 pm

Hi, I haven't fully read this thread yet, but so far, my take is that no one can teach you how to learn a language. That's something you have to learn on the way. .. Every language will be different, for every person, target community. I have a lot to learn, thanks.
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
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Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Fri Jun 28, 2019 6:10 am

It would take a very long time to read through the whole of this thread, and I haven't even read it through in its entirety myself. And there is an even longer one hidden in the belly of the almost dead HTLAL forum.

As for learning techniques we all have to find out what works for us, but I think I have found 'my way' when it comes to vocabulary learning. I know that out there there are people who use uncle Davey/prof.Huliganov's golden list system, where the idea is that you make a list of words you want to learn, and then you put it aside for a month or so, and then you throw out some of the words and wait for another month etc etc. I have tried it, and it didn't function for me - which I could demonstrate through statistics on the number of words I could understand after this exercise versus the number of words I could understand after making a list and then doing absolutely nothing with it.

WIth my own system I could boost my Serbian vocabulary from a third of the words guessable or known to two thirds guessable or known in about a month or so. The dictionary contained 15.000 Serbian headwords, and 10.000 headwords is enough to read non-fiction reasonable well so I think that this experiment demonstrated that I can learn words with wordlists. The big question is of course whether others also could, and here it is obvious that the method won't work well for people who depend on human contact or on learning words in context. I have the idea that once I have learnt enough words I can always add to my knowledge about the words by reading a lot later, but I can't read comfortably before I know at least something like 10.000 headwords. And I wouldn't try to have conversations in a language before I can think fluently in it.

If you use standard learning systems you do something completely different: you start with a small kernel of easy sentences provided to you by some guru (in person or through something like a textbook), and then you are supposed to add to that by listening and speaking with your guru and whatever native speakers you can find in your neighbourhood. That doesn't work for me: I forget things I just hear - I need to read them. And grammar should be visualized if I am to remember the rules - simply listing the rules in text isn't enough, and it would take forever to infer the rules myself from texts. Why should I invent a whole pile of wheels again when I can steal them from the venerable learned grammarians of the past? I'm also deeply sceptical about using graded readers and text book texts. Why do boring graded readers and textbook stuff when I can study Wikipedia texts for free with the help of a machine translation?

So all in all my learning methods may not be typical or acceptable to every one, but I have found some methods that work for me, and that's the important thing.

There is of course room for improvement. For instance I think the 'language guide' method with example sentences, hyperliteral translations and 'pretty' translations is the right way to go, but there are just not enough sources of this kind. So instead I study bilingual texts with an original native text to the left and (mostly) a machine translation to the right (humanmade if I can find one that is sufficiently loyal to the original), and I make my own concise mini grammars. But the big hole in my methods is that I listen far too little (partly because another big hobby of mine is listening to classical instrumental music, which prevent me from listening to words too), and I speak even less. But we all have our weak points.

Kunst138.JPG


By the way, PO: dziś rano przeczytałem polski tekst o niebiańskim przedmiocie Cruithne, który ma ścieżkę wokół słońca, którą częściowo dzieli z Ziemią. Ale to nie przekształca go w nasz drugi księżyc.
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Iversen
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4768
Joined: Sun Jul 19, 2015 7:36 pm
Location: Denmark
Languages: Monolingual travels in Danish, English, German, Dutch, Swedish, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Romanian and (part time) Esperanto
Ahem, not yet: Norwegian, Afrikaans, Platt, Scots, Russian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Albanian, Greek, Latin, Irish, Indonesian and a few more...
Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1027
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Re: Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

Postby Iversen » Sat Jun 29, 2019 10:25 pm

I have now done the repetitions for the Slavic languages except Ukrainian, the reason being that it is new in my heap of wordlists so I have to do repetitions for 6 columns in Ukrainian against 2 for the other languages. So I leave that for tomorrow, together with the repetitions for Indonesian and FInnish.

I'm not going to write much this time. The Slavic languages are so close to each others that many words are found in most or all of them, and the result is that when you find a minor difference you sometimes wonder whether it's the dictionaries that explain the words differently - or whether there really are differences. An example of this is "doba", which according to most of the dictionaries means something like "period" or "era" - but according to my big fat Polish dictionary from Pons it means '24 hours' in Polish (corresponding to "døgn" in Danish). And then you wonder whether the smaller dictionaries in some of the other languages just forgot to mention this meaning, or whether the Poles really went their own way in this case.

Another case: almost all my dictionaries that record the word "dolina" (not only the Slavic ones) it is simply translated as "valley", but one of the dictionaries - I have forgotten which one - claims that the hole has to be funnelshaped, and another translate it as a sinkhole (which also can be called "doline" in English). I have checked the etymology, and it does actually seem to be a Slovene or Russian word for a hole in the roof of a karstic cave - and then it has spread to other kinds of sinkholes and (with much less reason) to valleys in general. But apparently this development has happened even in the two languages which Wiktionary mention as possible sources for the original meaning, namely Slovenian and Russian. Just for fun I have read through (as best I could for a non-studied language) the Slovenian article about dolinas, and it lists an avalanche of types of valleys (including funny ones like the "konsekvéntna dolína"), but as far I can see none of the types of sinkholes. And the Slovenian articles about Postojna and Škocjan don't even contain the word "dolina" so I wonder how it can be of Slovenian origin. But the world is full of mysteries, and this is just one of them.

IND: Gambar di bawah ini menyajikan tempat di Deer Cave (Gua Rusa) yang disebut Eden. Ada lubang di loteng gua karst, jadi itu contoh spesimen 'dolina' (lubang runtuhan, bukan lembah)- jika ini sebenarnya makna aslinya. Saya mengunjung Taman Negara Gunung Mulu di Serawak pada tahun 2010.

Apart from that I have read (and copied) some more from my Polish Cruithne article, which I can use as pure relaxation now because it's the second time I study it.

F4041a05 _Eden in Deer Cave, Gunung Mulu.jpg
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