Brun Ugle comes clean: Confessions of a wayward owl (NO/ES/DE/JA/FR/PL/TR/KMR/BCS)

[Systematiker]

Hey it only took me two weeks to find your new log (or so)

Super excited for you, what you’re doing sounds awesome.

For what it’s worth, I concur with the explanations on a vs con but also when I read the sentence I thought “con” first too.

[Brun Ugle]

Oy, it looks like I’m just as bad at writing in my new log as I was in the old one! The 6WC hasn’t been going that well either. The first day was OK, but it went quickly downhill from there. I’m learning that having a social life takes up a lot of time. This weekend we were invited to dinner at the home of a Syrian couple as a reciprocal visit for having invited them and a couple of others to our home the week before. My boyfriend likes to fish, so we served freshly caught fish and homemade baklava (he also likes to make baklava as evidenced by my ever-widening hips ). The Syrian couple served various typical foods from that region and after dessert, they made coffee and the woman read my fortune in the coffee grounds. Unfortunately, I don’t know Arabic and none of the Arabic speakers were all that good at translating, so I don’t really know all that much more about my future than I did before having my fortune told, but it sounded like it would be pretty good from the little they managed to convey to me. (One of them said something about quadruplets. I hope that was a misunderstanding. )

Also, my boyfriend’s brother is planning to come for the weekend sometime in the next couple of weeks. He’s the only other member of the family who lives in Norway, just an hour and a half south of here by train. The only problem is, the guestroom is currently home to a feral cat. And that cat is very wild, so it’s not likely I’ll manage to tame him any time soon. And I’ve also got two kittens in the living room who are helping me with the typing. Blame any typos on them. (They just deleted the whole paragraph! Thank goodness for ctrl+z.)

Spanish
I’ve been working a little with my textbook and finding out that Spanish prepositions aren’t quite as straight-forward and simple as I’d always thought. They still seem a lot easier and more intuitive to me than German prepositions though. And thanks to everyone’s help, I think I understand the issue with “encontrarse con” vs “encontrarse a” now. I also listened to a podcast and watched a short cooking video, in part to make use of time that otherwise would be wasted and get more time in the 6WC, but also because I’m afraid of losing the progress I’ve made in Spanish these past few years now that I’m not spending much time with it.

German
I feel like I haven’t done any German, but I know I’ve done a little work on my textbook and also listened to a podcast. Still, it’s not enough to progress and I think my German is in much more danger than my Spanish. Certainly, my active skills disappear very easily. I haven’t talked to ZenMonkey in ages because one of us always has to cancel, so my spoken German and Spanish are both very rusty. Maybe I need to try to use some of the time when my boyfriend isn’t here to make recordings in German and Spanish and perhaps some of my other languages. I find it harder to work on languages when he’s here. I don’t feel comfortable doing things out loud, especially in languages he knows, and even when I do other kinds of study, I don’t concentrate as well when I’m not alone. Plus, he’s very noisy. He has a huge family and zillions of friends and he talks to them all on WhatsApp, but his volume is such that he hardly needs the phone. They probably hear him in Turkey without it. I suppose listening to all that Kurdish and Turkish in the background is helping me with those languages, but last night when I was trying to study Spanish, I found it very hard to concentrate with him shouting in Kurdish in the background.

I meant to read a book in German in the evenings during the 6WC, but I started a book in Norwegian shortly before, thinking I’d get through it quickly, but I somehow got out of my reading at night routine. Now I’m starting to get back into it. I put my tablet and phone away around 8 or so and get my book, but I don’t know that I’ll get to the German book anytime soon even so. The Norwegian one is pretty thick and I’ve learned that I’m no good at reading multiple fiction books at once. So, now I try to limit myself to one fiction and one non-fiction at a time, at most.

Japanese
I’m still mostly just working with Satori Reader. I find I can usually understand most of the story when I listen the first or second time, but there are still lots of things I miss. Even so, I find I understand things much easier in Japanese than in Turkish. The two languages are remarkably similar in structure. That is, the grammar and syntax aren’t so different. But I understand things I’ve never heard before in Japanese, while in Turkish, I can barely recognize sentences in Memrise that I’ve heard over and over unless they are three words or less. I suppose since I’ve spent a lot more time studying Japanese, it makes sense, but at the same time, I feel like I should be able to understand sentences that I’ve already learned in Turkish and I don’t. I have to listen multiple time to actually catch the whole sentence even though I’ve already learned it.

Polish
I finished Memrise Polish 1, but I haven’t started on 2 yet. I’ve just been reviewing 1. The reviews should be dying down a bit now though, so maybe I should start on 2. I complained the other week when Memrise made it so the hint keyboard popped up automatically instead of the regular keyboard and now they’ve gotten rid of the hint keyboard altogether. Why can’t they just leave good-enough alone?! I liked it when the regular keyboard popped up and I could have a try at figuring out the word, but I could put it down and see the hint keyboard with fewer letters if I couldn’t figure out the word on my own. I found I learned best when I tried on my own first and then had a look at the available letters only after I’d tried a bit. I hope they go back to that again. I’ve also done a bit of Clozemaster. I find Clozemaster very helpful for new languages, at least when it’s one of the languages that is divided up into levels. I don’t usually use the multiple choice. I just try to figure out the word on my own. I find it forces me to learn them. It sometimes takes a while to get through a round though, especially in Polish. I don’t find it that hard in Turkish, but Turkish doesn’t have as rich a sound or spelling system as Polish.

French
At Norwegian Training last Wednesday, a young French-speaking Belgian couple showed up. They spoke almost no Norwegian, so the librarian asked if I spoke French. I said I didn’t, but since I speak English, and one of them spoke a little English, I was the one that was supposed to teach them. Norwegian Training isn’t really designed for absolute beginners. It’s meant as conversation practice and every week we have a sheet with a topic and questions to discuss. We also have things like games and cards with pictures and stuff, but most of it isn’t really very suited for beginners. And I’m also not very good at teaching beginners because I’ve never done anything like that either as a teacher or as a student. Most of my language experience is as a student and I don’t do classes or tutoring when I am at A0. I don’t bother trying to talk to anyone until I can talk about something at least a little interesting.

Anyway, afterwards, I thought maybe I should work more on my French to be able to help them a bit better, but I haven’t really had much time to spend on it. I’ve started on “Grammaire Progressive du Français”, which I bought after seeing it mentioned several times on this forum, but now that I’m being open about studying French, I thought I could ask for some advice about what books would be good. I see that the “progressive” series is mentioned a lot, but it seems to have about a zillion books at each level. I feel like they broke it up into as many books as possible in order to get more money out of us. The books don’t seem very thick, so I feel like they could have fit several topics into one book. Which ones do I really need? Or would some other series be better? I’m also using FSI, Assimil and Memrise and might use DLI as well, but I do like having some kind of workbook or something and I feel like maybe I should try to learn to speak a little earlier rather than waiting a couple of years like I usually do, so something practical that could help with that might be nice.

BCS

I’ve mostly just been using Glossika for Croatian lately. I’ve got that feral cat in the guestroom that I’m trying to tame, so I try to spend some time everyday sitting on the floor in there and hand-feeding him to get him to associate humans with something pleasant. So, I do Glossika while I’m there to make it a little less boring and to get some studying in. Now that Glossika has given us the “listening-only” option back it’s once again useful for studying while doing other things like housework or cat-taming. Of course, I don’t listen passively, I try to shadow, and as much as possible, come up with the target-language sentence before the audio. I don’t know what the cat thinks of all this, but I figure hearing a voice is probably good for him too. It gets him used to human sounds and doing Glossika is easier and more interesting for me than just sitting there saying, “What a nice kitty!” all the time. In addition to Croatian, the cat is also learning Turkish and Polish via Glossika.

Turkish
I’d planned to try to go fairly quickly through the TY book I borrowed from the library, but I only made it through one more chapter (chapter 6). Instead, I’ve been mostly squeezing in bits of Memrise (reviews only), Clozemaster and Glossika when I have some time. Maybe I’ll have some more time in the next few weeks assuming we don’t invite more guests to dinner or get invited out too much. And I’m almost finished putting the bed together in the guestroom, so I shouldn’t have too much to do besides the normal stuff for the next week or two.

I’m finding a lot of overlap between Turkish and my other languages. I’d expected overlap between Turkish and Kurmanji and between Turkish and Serbo-Croatian, but there also seem to be quite a few loanwords from French and Spanish that have found their way into Turkish. Of course, there are lots of words like telefon, doktor, taksi and teknoloji that seem almost universal, but there are other loans that I was more surprised to meet. From French I’ve come across: enstrüman (instrument), kolye = necklace (collier), randevu = (rendez-vous), garson = waiter (garçon), grip = flu (grippe), among others. From Spanish: banyo = bathroom (baño), lavabo = sink (lavabo), regla = menstrual period (regla), bavul = suitcase (baúl), etc. I was more surprised by the Spanish cognates than by French since French was, after-all, a “lingua franca” at one time, but then I started wondering if maybe some of these Spanish words came via Ladino since so many Ladino speakers fled to Turkey after being thrown out of Spain.

I feel like I still haven’t gotten very far with Turkish, but I am able to understand bits of conversations around me sometimes. However, that’s probably more due to good guesswork than to actual listening comprehension skills. For example, one day my boyfriend was talking on the phone to the brother that lives in Norway and they happened to be talking in Turkish. Suddenly I said to him in Norwegian, “I’ve decided not to bother painting the guestroom until later. I’m just going to buy a bed and then your brother will be able to come.” He looked at me in shock and said, “You know Turkish!?” But I’d only understood a couple words of the conversation “misafir odası” (guest room) and inferred the rest because I knew the background for it since he’d already mentioned that his brother wanted to come for a visit.

Kurmanji
Kurmanji is tough. There aren’t a lot of good resources and the language isn’t entirely standardized so it seems like there are always several words meaning the same thing and all my resources use different ones and it drives me a bit nuts sometimes. I’ve tried several textbooks, but the one I’m using at the moment is Learn Kurdish: A multi-level course in Kurmanji by Baran Rizgar. It’s reasonably good. Some of the vocabulary is not really what I’d consider the most essential for my life, though maybe if I lived in Kurdistan it would be useful to know how to talk about goats and village chieftains. It doesn’t start with useful phrases like greetings and small talk and telling your name and so on. Instead it is very much grammar-based in its approach. I’m going through it extremely slowly because I’m putting everything into LWT as well as writing all the exercises by hand in my notebook, but I feel like I have to go word by word like this since most of the resources are so poor and I need that base in LWT just to be able to figure out the meanings of things. I’m using the Kurdish Wiktionary as my main dictionary for LWT and I can only do about 20 words per hour because I have to find them in Wiktionary, copy the definition to Google Translate (which is terrible, but still helps a little), check the translations to other languages at the bottom of the page, sometimes I go to the English, German or French Wiktionary pages if they have the word (often they don’t, but when they do, it can be useful), I also check a dictionary I have on PDF (it’s not searchable, so I have to do it manually), and sometimes a little paper dictionary. One of the reasons I use this textbook as my source is because all the Kurdish sentences are translated and it has a vocabulary section with most of the words defined. So, with the textbook and my various dictionaries, I can be reasonably sure of getting the right definition and grammatical information for each word in the right context. Before, I had been using a textbook that is meant for A1 level and goes through the typical themes like introducing yourself and talking about your age, your job, your family, etc. But the Kurdish wasn’t translated and often I couldn’t quite figure out the idiomatic usage of the words or what forms they were in or what the base forms were. Word for word translations aren’t always useful and sometimes I couldn’t find the translation of the phrase or didn’t understand how the words were being used. So, I’ll go back to that when I have a little more background in Kurdish and have enough words and phrases defined in LWT that I can figure out what’s going on better. Putting the sentences into Google Translate wasn’t always helpful as it doesn’t seem to know much more Kurdish than I do. Here is an example of one of it’s more coherent translations. This is the definition of “mast” (yoghurt) in the Kurdish Wiktionary “şîrê ku bi hêvênî meyandî û tîrkirî”. Google says this means, “milk with butter and fried eggs”. My own translation based on looking up each word, “milk fermented or thickened with yeast”. And many of its translation attempts are even worse. So, you can see why this process is so slow.

So far, I’ve been working on nouns in the textbook. Kurmanji nouns have two genders (masculine and feminine) and three cases (direct, oblique and vocative). Direct is basically nominative, vocative is obviously for talking directly to someone (e.g. calling their name), and oblique is sort of a catch-all for everything else. The noun is definite in its base form. Singular and plural are the same in the definite direct case. To make it indefinite, you have to add –(y)ek in the singular and –(y)in in the plural. Endings with a y are used when a word ends in a vowel, and without the y if it ends in a consonant. To modify a noun with and adjective or possessive, you need to add an îzafe ending to the noun. The adjective or possessive then comes after. Nouns and pronouns used as possessives must be in the oblique case. The endings are different depending on whether the noun is masculine or feminine or plural and on whether it is definite or indefinite. Masculine and feminine are only different in singular; the plural forms are the same for both. Many nouns referring to people (professions, etc) can be either masculine or feminine, you just use the appropriate endings according to the gender of the person. In general, there isn’t any way to determine whether a noun is masculine or feminine in the direct case, so it is best to learn the nouns with an îzafe ending in a phrase with an adjective or something.

None of my books has much in the way of audio, so I am also using a video series called Dersa Kurdî which can be found on YouTube. It’s all in Kurdish though, so I think I’ll need to watch the whole series multiple times to get as much out of it as possible. It’s cheaply done, but very good and mildly amusing. I’m also using Utalk for it’s crystal-clear audio. I wish they weren’t so obsessed with sports though. And then there is my boyfriend. I’ve been trying to train him up to help me. He sort of gets it, but not quite, so I haven’t really done so much with him yet. I borrowed some ordinary children’s books (in Norwegian) from the library and I’m trying to get him to describe the pictures to me. At first, he wanted to just translate and tell the story to me, but I told him that I’m not advanced enough for that to be useful for me. I eventually managed to convince him to describe pictures, but he stills seems to be more concerned with getting through the book rather than getting as much as possible out of each picture. He needs to be more repetitive. We’ve only done it twice so far though as I haven’t wanted to bug him too much, so maybe I’ll give it another try and see if I can get him to slow down and describe things in more detail.

[rdearman]

Way of the Lazy Fist, tip # 171: All new romantic interests should speak a language you already know.

[iguanamon]

...I’m finding a lot of overlap between Turkish and my other languages. I’d expected overlap between Turkish and Kurmanji and between Turkish and Serbo-Croatian, but there also seem to be quite a few loanwords from French and Spanish that have found their way into Turkish. Of course, there are lots of words like telefon, doktor, taksi and teknoloji that seem almost universal, but there are other loans that I was more surprised to meet. From French I’ve come across: enstrüman (instrument), kolye = necklace (collier), randevu = (rendez-vous), garson = waiter (garçon), grip = flu (grippe), among others. From Spanish: banyo = bathroom (baño), lavabo = sink (lavabo), regla = menstrual period (regla), bavul = suitcase (baúl), etc. I was more surprised by the Spanish cognates than by French since French was, after-all, a “lingua franca” at one time, but then I started wondering if maybe some of these Spanish words came via Ladino since so many Ladino speakers fled to Turkey after being thrown out of Spain. ...

Yes, Turkish had a huge influence on Ladino vocabulary and even grammar to a certain extent and Ladino had some influence on Turkish vocabulary too. It was a two way street over 500 years of interaction, but the Turkish lanes into Ladino carried much more traffic. The Ladino lane into Turkish was more like a footpath. There are a lot of Turkish loanwords in Ladino, as one would expect. If I ever decide to learn it, I expect to get at least some vocabulary discount.

[Brun Ugle]

Way of the Lazy Fist, tip # 171: All new romantic interests should speak a language you already know.

No, no, no! The whole point of romantic interests is to learn a new language! Although it might make sense to choose one whose language you already know at at least a A2 level so that you can have some basic conversations. I probably should have found myself a Spanish, German, French, or Japanese speaker. All of those are either good enough for basic conversation or could become good enough in a very short time. Of course, once you get the language up to C2, it’s time for a new boyfriend with a different native language.

[mentecuerpo]

Way of the Lazy Fist, tip # 171: All new romantic interests should speak a language you already know.

No, no, no! The whole point of romantic interests is to learn a new language! Although it might make sense to choose one whose language you already know at at least a A2 level so that you can have some basic conversations. I probably should have found myself a Spanish, German, French, or Japanese speaker. All of those are either good enough for basic conversation or could become good enough in a very short time. Of course, once you get the language up to C2, it’s time for a new boyfriend with a different native language.

Italian: romance language, Romantic, in Roma=amoR
It is for a reason that Roma is amoR spelled backwards.

[Daniel N.]

grip = flu (grippe), among others. From Spanish: banyo = bathroom (baño), lavabo = sink (lavabo),

Guess how I call, in Croatia, bathroom sink and flu? Lavabo and gripa. In Serbia, it's grip.

[Cavesa]

Way of the Lazy Fist, tip # 171: All new romantic interests should speak a language you already know.

No, no, no! The whole point of romantic interests is to learn a new language! Although it might make sense to choose one whose language you already know at at least a A2 level so that you can have some basic conversations. I probably should have found myself a Spanish, German, French, or Japanese speaker. All of those are either good enough for basic conversation or could become good enough in a very short time. Of course, once you get the language up to C2, it’s time for a new boyfriend with a different native language.

Your logic of keeping a boyfriend only long enough to get to C2 means, that it is actually very smart to find one speaking a language with few resources, such as Kurmanji, to enjoy a long term relationship

And I was about to joke that 6wc in your case seems to be 6 languages per week challenge, but then I counted the list more carefully.

[Brun Ugle]

grip = flu (grippe), among others. From Spanish: banyo = bathroom (baño), lavabo = sink (lavabo),

Guess how I call, in Croatia, bathroom sink and flu? Lavabo and gripa. In Serbia, it's grip.

Cool! I’ve noticed a that there seem to be quite a few cognates between Turkish and BCS, and sometimes also with Kurmanji. For example clock/hour: sat (BCS), saat (TR), saet (KMR). So, while learning so many languages at once means I don’t have enough time for any of them, at least they reinforce each other, which reduces the work a little bit.

[Brun Ugle]

Way of the Lazy Fist, tip # 171: All new romantic interests should speak a language you already know.

No, no, no! The whole point of romantic interests is to learn a new language! Although it might make sense to choose one whose language you already know at at least a A2 level so that you can have some basic conversations. I probably should have found myself a Spanish, German, French, or Japanese speaker. All of those are either good enough for basic conversation or could become good enough in a very short time. Of course, once you get the language up to C2, it’s time for a new boyfriend with a different native language.

Your logic of keeping a boyfriend only long enough to get to C2 means, that it is actually very smart to find one speaking a language with few resources, such as Kurmanji, to enjoy a long term relationship

It’s even better than that. His native language is technically Kurmanji, but he learned Turkish as a child, so he’s basically native in that too. So, I have two relatively difficult languages to learn to C2, which means we’ll probably be together forever.