2020 Language Log - Sedge

[Sedge]

I'm going to try to keep a log this year; not sure how consistent I will be. My priority is actually studying the languages.

Currently I have plans to cover at least some material in a whopping 6 languages this year:
German
Spanish
American Sign Language
Inuktitut (South Baffin Dialect; may pick up some materials in North Baffin dialect if I exhaust what I can find in South Baffin)
Japanese
Russian

Icelandic may sneak in at some point, as may any other language that catches my fancy.

German
Deutsch is what I consider to be my second language, although I had some formal study in Russian, Spanish, and Japanese, and even French, before I ever started learning German. I am far from fluent. My first teacher was useless and an idiot, but I had three years with a wonderful teacher, and a scattering of other work. Whenever I am studying languages, I make an effort to maintain or improve my German. Right now, I'm using Duolingo, but I also have German editions of some of my favorite books to read this year.

Spanish
Español is a convenience language for me. I was required to do a six-week intro course when I was eleven or so, and I'd picked up a few key phrases and concepts thanks to a large Spanish-speaking population in my hometown. My brother is fluent in Spanish. I chose to study German, and therefore of course my next international destination was Ecuador, where I quickly picked up "survival-level" Spanish (and also learned how to order two beers, because my classmates deemed this required vocabulary even though I don't drink beer). I proceeded to not study any further Spanish until I wound up in Costa Rica on a similar trip, at which point I was forced to admit that Spanish might be useful to a biologist who keeps winding up in Latin America.

I don't have any plans to visit any Spanish-speaking countries in the foreseeable future, so right now I'm also mostly trying to maintain and slowly improve my Spanish. I'm using the same basic tools as I am with German... just at a lower level. In German I'll be making my way through the same books I read in English. In Spanish, I'm still in the picture books.

American Sign Language
Years ago, I was an intern and regularly worked with a volunteer who was Deaf. He was able to speak pretty well, and was very talented at reading lips, so in general it wasn't a problem to communicate. But then one afternoon we were at a show where it was loud and I couldn't pick out what he was saying over the noise from the crowds. He patiently repeated, and repeated, and repeated whatever he needed to say to me, until I understood... and I got more and more mad at myself because if I spoke his language as well as he spoke mine, noise would never be a problem. I didn't have regular internet access at the time, but as soon as I did, I found an online course (https://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/) and started learning. And I love it. I ended up getting busy and abandoning regular study for a while, but I've been back to studying daily for about a month and a half. I've completed a full college semester worth of study, and my goal is to get through at least another semester worth this year. The instructor's YouTube channel has a ton of additional videos, plus there's tons of other ASL resources on YouTube too.

Inuktitut
My 2020 challenge language! I made my first set of flash cards in advance so I could jump right in on January 1. I'm interested to see how far I get; but right now I'm just interested in how the process of learning the syllabics will go. Previously, I've always learned new writing systems when I have been in school or otherwise doing a lot of hand-written notes, so I would just start substituting the new letters or syllabics for whatever the equivalent English sound is, until I have all of the symbols down. Right now, I rarely hand-write notes (and when I do, they're usually intended to be shared with others.) so I'm going to have to do some more intentional direct-study of the symbols. In the meantime, I'm slowly making my way through the lessons at tusaalanga.ca and adding a bit of vocabulary and new grammar each day.

Japanese
I visited Japan as a pre-teen and have always been intrigued by the language and particularly the writing systems. So once I get my Inuktitut syllabics down, I'm going to embark into learning Hiragana, refreshing and improving my knowledge of katakana, and then actually studying the language.

Russian
Russian was the second language, after English, that I had any formal instruction in. We had a visiting teacher from Russia who offered to teach Russian language and culture to any student who was willing to write a report on a famous Russian. I loved the class, but when the teacher went home, I didn't have resources available to continue to study. By the time we got the internet, I was planning my visit to Japan and wanted to learn some Japanese instead. Last year I spent a few weeks refreshing my knowledge of Cyrillic and starting the Duolingo course in Russian; I found it far more difficult to start from scratch and I'm not sure if it is the starting from scratch, or the starting from scratch when I'm still not super confident at reading Cyrillic that was the problem. This year I want to get a book course and start working on Russian in that format.

[kubernos]

You can watch movies in different languages for better understanding of the languages?

[Deinonysus]

ᐊᔪᙱᒋᐊᕐᓗᑎᑦ!
Ajunngigiarlutit!
Good luck!

That's from Omniglot and it doesn't specify the dialect but it seems to be North Baffin. The South Baffin version might the same, or it could be ᐊᔪᙱᒋᐊᓪᓗᑎᑦ (ajunngigiallutit), with the "rl" replaced with a double "l".

I used the Inuktitut Morphological Analyser (my first time using it!) to see if I could break it down. It consists of:

• ajuq/1v - (1) to be unable to or incapable of doing s.t. (2) to not work, to be out of order
• nngit/1vv - general negation; 'not'
• giaq/1vv - commencement of action: 'begin to'
• lutit/tv-part-2s-fut - participle, 2nd person singular, future

I think it should literally mean something like "while you will not be incapable of beginning to do it", or a bit less literally, "you can do it!"

Unfortunately it looks like the Morphological Analyser only works for North Baffin.

[Querneus]

Best of luck this year, Sedge! Try not to force yourself to get swamped with more than you can handle by the end of the year.

I used the Inuktitut Morphological Analyser (my first time using it!) to see if I could break it down. It consists of:

• ajuq/1v - (1) to be unable to or incapable of doing s.t. (2) to not work, to be out of order
• nngit/1vv - general negation; 'not'
• giaq/1vv - commencement of action: 'begin to'
• lutit/tv-part-2s-fut - participle, 2nd person singular, future

I think it should literally mean something like "while you will not be incapable of beginning to do it", or a bit less literally, "you can do it!"

Unfortunately it looks like the Morphological Analyser only works for North Baffin.

Ahh, morphological analyzers... I love those things. There is an excellent free morphological analyzer for Latin, and a few free sentence parsers for Mandarin Chinese (also one or two for Cantonese), and I have benefited tremendously from them. English Wiktionary at times tries to be such a thing for some languages, but it doesn't seem to have succeeded to create enough automatically generated pages to be considered a morphological analyzer, except for English maybe.

I wish those things existed for more languages. I remember wishing I had anything like the Latin analyzer back in the days when I studied Written Arabic seriously... The Latin one is especially useful to think of parsings you haven't entertained (like a noun ending in -is being 3rd declension genitive singular or 3rd declension accusative plural, or the dative/ablative plural of a 1st/2nd declension noun you didn't even know existed).

[Sedge]

You can watch movies in different languages for better understanding of the languages?

Yes, but I'm not very good at this mechanism for learning; it was something we did a reasonable amount of in German class, but video is something that I pay attention to better when other people are watching with me... I'm not even good about sitting through a whole movie in English and I get frustrated when I mis-hear things (I watch video with closed captions on whenever I have the option, regardless of language, for this reason).

ᐊᔪᙱᒋᐊᕐᓗᑎᑦ!
Ajunngigiarlutit!
Good luck!

ᓇᑯᕐᒦᒃ!
nakurmiik!
Thank you!

I confess to having delved into the Glossary at Tusaalanga to find this term, as it isn't offered until fairly late in the lessons. Interestingly, they also have ᖁᔭᓐᓇᒦᒃ qujannamiik listed as "thank you", but the audio has the same pronunciation, nakurmiik. The speaker is different, so they didn't just repeat the audio file. I'll have to figure out what's going on with that as I go along, and definitely will need to investigate the morphological analyser - that will be really useful!

Your skill and/or determination at finding good resources is inspiring.

Best of luck this year, Sedge! Try not to force yourself to get swamped with more than you can handle by the end of the year.

Thanks! I think the first four languages on my list won't be a problem - I've been studying three of the four concurrently off and on for a while now; Japanese and Russian will be more of a challenge. I haven't kept up with either Cyrillic or Katakana enough to easily sound out words written in either system, so re-learning them right after learning Inuktitut syllabics might be a lot to handle. but it's a goal.

[Sedge]

German Update
I finished the book I've been reading at work, so tomorrow, I start in on my German editions of a favorite fantasy series.

Inuktitut Update!
Yesterday, I decided that I am confident enough in a bit over a third of the syllabics to remove those cards from my current deck of flash cards. I didn't start out with all of the syllabics at once - the first day, I took my first few vocabulary terms and the syllabics that were used in those; then the next day I added a bit more vocab and the relevant syllabics, and the next day I had to add some syllabics that weren't used in any vocab yet. I left all the vocabulary in the deck for now. I've been testing myself by making a list (in English) of what I should be able to write, then on my breaks at work, writing it out, and then checking it when I get home. As I get better with the syllabics, I will be able to go faster with the vocabulary.

1/52 of the way through the year, and things are going well...

[Sedge]

German
It has been a number of years since I actually read large sections of text in German (verses one-to-three sentences from a language lesson), and I'm honestly kind of pleasantly shocked at how easily it's going. Now, there is a LOT of individual vocabulary words that I don't know, and the grammar is right at the top of my skill level, but I'm able to fill in almost everything from context.

I find it really interesting that the way I approach reading in German is very different from either Spanish or English. Obviously it's going to be different from English, because I don't have to translate English to understand it. There's some German words and phrases that I understand without needing to mentally translate them, but I largely still have to translate. What is interesting is that I'm starting to translate German by sentence or more conceptually instead of word-by-word.

In Spanish, I most often read out loud, but even if I'm not, I go word-by-word. "El primer the first cerdito pig construyó constructed su casa his house rápidamente quickly, sin without planear planning mucho much." And then in many cases I have to go back and rearrange the words into the order that makes sense in English, if I really want to understand what's being said. Sometimes the translation is fast, other times it's slow. But it's individual words or short phrases at a time.

I expected that German would be a similar process, given the complexity of grammar and number of unfamiliar words. Instead, between the words that I do know and the fact that it's a familiar story, I'm reading the German words and subvocalizing in pidgin, skipping back when I've got enough context to fill in an unfamiliar word, but it feels smooth. Way smoother than I expected.

Spanish
Still doing daily Duolingo.

ASL
I haven't been working on ASL every day. I'll probably do Spanish daily for a while and ASL every few days, and then switch them.

Inuktitut
This one I've been doing every day. I've gotten the syllabics down well enough to take all of the individual letters out of my working flashcards stack!

I did at one point have a goal of having Lesson 1 of Tusaalanga done by the January 14, and I don't think that's going to happen. I'm being pretty conservative about the number of new vocabulary terms I add each day. I keep reminding myself that this is not a race, and I'm only a couple of weeks in. I'm having fun, but I'm also impatient because it has been a very, very long time since I started a new language completely from scratch, so it's hard to remember that slow is normal. And even though I can now recognize and read all of the syllabics, I don't read them fluidly yet so that still slows me down a bit more.

Also, I included all of the words, roots, and suffixes in the "grammar" section as well as the vocabulary section on my flashcards, otherwise I'd definitely be done with lesson one by 1/14.

[Sedge]

Inuktitut

Finished with Lesson 1, and working on an initial run-through of Lesson 2. I'm also planning to purchase the workbooks for South Qikiqtaaluk available from Pirurvik, which is the organization that created/maintains tusaalanga.ca.

Learning the pronoun suffixes was way more difficult than I was expecting.
And lesson 2, I have a new set of pronoun suffixes to learn (for interrogatives), but at least they appear to be closely related to the equivalent nominative suffixes, so hopefully it won't be as difficult.

[Sedge]

I have been very busy with Inuktitut recently. I got my workbooks from Pirurvik, which has a whole page of extra "basic" vocabulary in the beginning, as well as some extra information that isn't in the lessons on tusaalanga, so I've added flashcards for all of that and have been going through those. It's a lot... but I suspect it will make future lessons go faster. For instance, the book calls out all of the basic question-words, which tusalaanga has included as roots in questions, and knowing the roots will really speed up memorizing new questions.

I also want to point out that the response that I got when I reached out to Pirurvik was very fast, helpful, and polite, and the books arrived much faster than I expected. All in all this has been a positive experience!

[golyplot]

I'm kind of curious what your study methods are like for ASL.


I don't mean to be discouraging, but ASL is to date the only language I've given up on, and that's despite being unusually motivated to learn it! I eventually concluded that it is impossible to get more than a surface level understanding of ASL through the internet no matter how hard you try. And before you ask, yes, I went to every Deaf event in the area I could find for almost a year, but I wasn't getting anything out of it. I'm introverted and didn't know anyone, and an hour or two per month of signing like a caveman isn't going to do anything under the best of circumstances anyway. I also took several in-person ASL classes but sadly wasn't able to continue them. If I ever am in a position where I can practice regularly with a skilled signer, I might try to pick it back up, but until now, I consider it a lost cause.