Guyome's log

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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Tue Sep 21, 2021 3:56 pm

Uzbek
Did lessons 8 and 9 of the course but little else.

Persian
Persian is lurking in the background. I did some reading here and there but not much.

Yiddish
I'm binge listening to yiddish24 podcasts. Right now I'm in the middle of the 10-episode series about Shabbatai Tsvi. Each episode is about 60 minutes long so I generally listen to one half on my way to work and to the other half on my way back.

All this rekindled my interest in the language and I have started to read In vayser farfalnkayt (In White Hopelessness), a novel published in 1969 about life in the Soviet forced labor camps. I'm only about 40 pages in so it's not clear yet who the main characters are and what kind of story will develop. The author, Yekhiel Hofer (1906-1972), was himself "exiled to the distant North".
It's not necessarily the book I would have chosen first but the setting, in the Gulag archipelago, interests me very much and the book has been sitting on my shelf for about a year (it's one of the few Yiddish books I own). At this point, I'm just hoping it won't be a saccharine love story between one of the male inmates and Dina, one of the few females inmates in the camp.


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DaveAgain
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby DaveAgain » Tue Sep 21, 2021 4:18 pm

guyome wrote: the setting, in the Gulag archipelago, interests me very much
I read Labour and the Gulag last year, the soviet authorities' indifference to the suffering of their fellow citizens is astonishing.
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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Wed Sep 22, 2021 8:16 am

Thanks for mentioning this book, Dave Again! It looks like an interesting angle on the history of Communism.

I have a few copies of the פאריזער צייטשריפט, a Yiddish literary journal published in Paris during the 1950s/1960s. The first issue(s?) are big about mourning the death of Stalin and lamenting how great a loss it is. To their credit, they later acknowledged this wasn't exactly the most intelligent thing they had done.

Even today in France it's not too hard to find people who hate on capitalism/the West/... so much that they feel it somehow makes it ok to praise China, Russia or Chavez's Venezuela as beacons of light. As if very real problems on one side made it ok to turn a blind eye to no less real problems on the other side...In the immortal words of Sybil Fawlty, "You never learn, do you? You never, ever learn!".
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cjareck
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby cjareck » Thu Sep 23, 2021 8:48 pm

guyome wrote:Even today in France it's not too hard to find people who hate on capitalism/the West/... so much that they feel it somehow makes it ok to praise China, Russia or Chavez's Venezuela as beacons of light.

Don't blame French people for that. We were forced to that side for many years and managed to switch sides, but many still think it was better during communist times... And I don't mean youngsters who don't remember that. I was only 9 when the communist rule was overthrown, but I still remember my parents going to butcher's in the evening to stay in the queue to buy something in the morning and some scenes like that... Sorry for messing in your log. I couldn't resist writing my comment ;)
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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Sun Oct 03, 2021 9:00 am

Yiddish

I've been swimming in a sea of Yiddish content this week, reading left and right, and also listening to podcasts. I know the tide will recede at some point but right now it's Yiddish, Yiddish, and more Yiddish.

It's mostly about exploring Yiddish24 at the moment. Rather unsurprisingly, a lot of the content has to do with US affairs, which is interesting to listen to because you get a US Hasidic viewpoint on these, but I guess I'll grow weary of it at some point in the near future. So far, it looks like Interviews, History, and a couple of other podcasts are more likely to hold my interest in the long run.

Interviews are the most difficult ones to listen to. Speakers change all the time so you have to get used to a wider variety of accents, etc. There's also the fact that the interviewees may or may not be used to speaking on the radio and it seems to me that many don't really make any effort to speak clearly. Last but not least, these interviews are done on the phone (or on a computer maybe) and not in a studio, so sound quality is not always that good, and sometimes it is outright bad.

I'm still reading through Hofer's In vayser farfalnkayt but things seem to move at a glacial pace, which is, I guess, fitting for a story set in the Russian North. I'm dozens of pages in and there's has been basically no plot so far, no action, but also no dialogues, no inner monologues, no detailed descriptions...Thinking back, I'm a bit at a loss to say what were all these pages filled with. It is as if the reader is given a bit of everything but not enough of it to make any deep impression. It's both tantalising and frustrating.

The utter lack of dialogues (or monologues, for that matter) also led me to realise once more that what I enjoy most in Yiddish is that it is a very lively language (for lack of a better term). It really comes to life in speech. Hofer's narrative prose on the other hand comes out as a little...dull to me. To be fair, that's probably something I could say of a lot of authors and languages. Nothing can come quite close to the thrill of reading Latin sentences in this domain and everything else often feels too...plain? That's why I'd like to see more speech-in-writing in Hofer's book. That's where Yiddish really shines through in my opinion.

But I'm probably unfair towards Hofer's prose and prose in languages other than Latin in general. Someone like Joan Bodon achieves great effects with a simple enough looking Occitan prose (same goes with Simenon in French), so it's not as simple as "outward complexity=better". And in the case of In vayser farfalnkayt, it might be that the total muteness of Shimon (the young doctor we've been following to the camp) and the almost total muteness of people around him is something carefully crafted to evoke his feeling of loneliness, isolation, stupefaction and inability to speak/think clearly after being arrested and sent to the gulag.
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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Wed Nov 17, 2021 10:29 pm

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Last edited by guyome on Fri Jul 01, 2022 7:27 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Le Baron
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby Le Baron » Wed Nov 17, 2021 10:38 pm

guyome wrote:no extensive reading but no intensive reading either. Instead I settled on a mixed approach, keeping a dictionary at hand but only using it after seeing a word being repeated something like 3 times.

This is pretty much how I've read any language I've ever learned and how I still read foreign languages I'm learning. It minimises intensity and lets you move through material (which you can re-read). It only needs a tolerance for not wanting to understand every last word.

I find your written English very good and fluent with a varied vocabulary.
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Carmody
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby Carmody » Thu Nov 18, 2021 2:08 am

guyome

Thank you so much for your very comprehensive answer it was very inspiring and empowering. I am just very amazed at the results from your methodology.

My methodology is exactly what you describe when you say:
guyome wrote:
no extensive reading but no intensive reading either. Instead I settled on a mixed approach, keeping a dictionary at hand but only using it after seeing a word being repeated something like 3 times.
I will also add that when the day comes that I actually go to sleep and then wake up speaking and writing French with your level of excellence in English, then, I will surely believe I have died and gone to heaven. I am not shooting to be a polyglot, but rather just become proficient in the French language. You are so far beyond C3 in English that it is embarrassing. For which heartfelt congratulations.

Thank you for sharing.
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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Fri Dec 03, 2021 10:06 pm

Le Baron wrote:

Carmody wrote:
Many thanks to you both for your (probably too) generous appraisal. I know I still have a long way to go but it's encouraging to get such feedback!
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guyome
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Re: Guyome's log

Postby guyome » Fri Dec 03, 2021 10:15 pm

Manchu
I have been reading a lot of Manchu as of late. I hadn't done much with this language over the last few months and as a consequence it took me a few pages to get back to a satisfying reading speed. As always, my main problem lies with vocab, especially words I know I have checked many times already in the past but keep forgetting every time I get away from Manchu for a few weeks/months.

One thing I did over the last couple of days is to read a short story rather intensively, looking up every word I was even slightly unsure of in the dictionary. Most of these ended up being common-ish words of the type described above. Having a list of them and carrying it everywhere with me over the next few days should take care of these, at least for the time being. Hopefully I'll learn them well enough this time.

Retention would be helped in no small way by my rereading the short story I culled them from but there are so many new, shiny texts to read! I'll see what I can do...
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