ALTVM VIDETVR

[rdearman]

Thutlwa ke phôlôgôlô e ntlê

[vonPeterhof]

Had our first online session with the Setswana Study Group on Monday and it was pretty fun. Unfortunately I haven't managed to get much studying done this past week beyond that, but I guess there's no rush. On the weekend I also tried out the Setswana lessons on the uTalk app that was promoted on this year's Polyglot Gathering, and that seems like it could be a good tool for revision and practising pronunciation. One interesting thing about it though is that the male and female speakers appear to be speaking different dialects: sometimes what they're saying won't match the spelling (the man appears to be saying "nyaya" instead of "nnyaa" for "no", while the woman says something like "o amoselegile" instead of "o amogelesegile" for "you're welcome"), plus the woman appears to be making the [ɪ]/[e] and [ʊ]/[o] distinctions that I mentioned in a previous post.

Other than that I managed to finish lesson 48 of Lambdin's Biblical Hebrew. Plus, on last Saturday we had a small meetup of this year's Polyglot Gathering attendants who happened to be in Moscow. We sat in a café and in a park, sharing stories of our travels and language learning tips, and then the few of us who remained till the end finished the day by visiting the informal gathering spot of World Cup fans in Moscow, Nikolskaya street. I even got a little German practice out of it! Oh, and since the broadcast of the first season of Golden Kamuy has finished (with a second season confirmed for the autumn season, yay!), I've compiled my attempts at snarking about it on Twitter in Ainu.

And now, some songs in Setswana:

[eido]

"Despacito" in Setswana is everything. That girl's got it. It actually makes the song listenable.

[vonPeterhof]

I seem to have finally settled into a comfortable pace for Hebrew, now successfully managing to complete one lesson per week (just finished lesson 50, so five more to go). However, focusing so squarely on Hebrew and Setswana means I have practically no time to finish off Ingrian and Avar. It doesn't help that I'm still trying to settle on a routine for Setswana. While I still feel like Mistry's Introduction to Spoken Setswana works the best in terms of gradually introducing the grammar to the learner as opposed to just throwing out a bunch of sentences without really explaining the different structures, the format is very much geared towards classroom study and may not be the best for our group study sessions (unless we manage to find a native speaker willing to play the role of our tutor). uTalk works very well for thematic vocabulary and drilling pronunciation, but aside from the very first lesson most others have a very high informational load, so completing the memorization of all the sentences in a given lesson without a good foundation in the grammatical structures takes up a lot of time.

Learning Setswana has also rekindled my interest in South Africa (back when I was studying in the IB Diploma Programme I had an English teacher from South Africa who introduced us to literature from there, like Cry the Beloved Country, Tsotsi and Tatamkhulu Afrika's poem Nothing's Changed), feeding into wanderlust. I am now fighting off the desire to also take up both Afrikaans and Xhosa, and maybe a Khoisan language too - listening to South African radio I was pleased to learn that in addition to the eleven official languages and Hindi, the SABC also runs a station in two Khoisan languages, !Xu and Khwe. I suppose Afrikaans sounds like the most realistic option at this point, in terms of both resource availability and interference avoidance, but I should probably bring my routine in order first.

[vonPeterhof]

I seem to have finally settled into a comfortable pace for Hebrew, now successfully managing to complete one lesson per week

Aaand I jinxed it right away, since I only managed to complete the following lesson two weeks later, yesterday. I would have completed it last weekend if I didn't have to travel to St. Pete and back for a birthday celebration. And now I'm not too confident I'll be able to complete the next lesson this coming week, as it's going to get busy at work with quite a bit of overtime.

In more exciting news, I've officially registered for this year's Polyglot Conference in Ljubljana in October, which means that I'm doing Slovene now! Slovene is probably the Slavic language that I've had the least exposure to, and to some extent that was deliberate on my part: I've been avoiding reading it so as not to get wrong stress/tonal patterns stuck in my head (this is less of a concern with most other Slavic languages I never tried studying, as the major West Slavic languages and Macedonian have fixed stress, whereas the East Slavic languages and Bulgarian have stress patterns very similar to those of Russian). Pretty much all I knew about it coming in was the fact that it has preserved the dual number, has a pitch accent system and that there's great dialectical diversity. Now that I've started learning a lot of things have surprised me: the fact that, like in Slovak, Belarusian and Ukrainian, syllable-final /v/ becomes more like [w]; the fact that, unlike BCMS, the graphemes ⟨nj⟩ and ⟨lj⟩ don't represent palatal consonants, and when there isn't a vowel following them the ⟨j⟩ has no effect on the pronunciation whatsoever; the fact that the word for "yes" is the German "ja", whereas the word for "I" is "jaz", which seems stuck in transition from the Proto-Slavic "azǔ" and the modern "ja" which is used in all other Slavic languages aside from Bulgarian and Macedonian. The prosody actually seems simpler than that of BCMS, as the distribution of vowel length is predictable outside of final stressed syllables.

For my studies I'm using the free Slovene Learning Online course (registration required). It's not quite as engaging as slovake.eu, but it does seem to have a good way of presenting information in bite-sized chunks, and it's not like there's a huge variety of online resources for Slovene anyway. I've also tried out the uTalk lessons, which should be easier to advance through for me than the Setswana ones, as I already have a good grasp of the grammatical fundamentals and a huge vocabulary discount. And speaking of Setswana, while I'm still using Mistry's book as my main resource, I've also added Memrise courses to my routine, one of which is actually based on Mistry's book (something that I didn't even realize until it was pointed out to me during our latest group study session ). While I was initially turned off by the Memrise courses' lack of audio and tone indicators, the fact that the reviews test both passive and active recall (through typing) should be very good reinforcement for the book's material. I'm up to Cycle 22 in the book, but I decided to pause my study of the book for now, until I've caught up to that point in the Memrise course (there I'm currently at Cycle 8).

[vonPeterhof]

Another week, another random travel plan! In what is half random whim and half an idea I've had for a long time, I'll be going to Spain for a few days a bit more than a week from now. My travels will be limited to Castile (Madrid, Cuenca and Burgos), so just Castellano should be enough Since I have been sittiing on this idea I've been doing Spanish on Lingvist and have already done most of the Pimsleur Castilian Spanish course, so now I just have to finish the latter by doing it more consistently. I'll also try to do most of the travel-themed Spanish lessons on uTalk.

One thing I noticed doing the Pimsleur lessons is how much interference I'm getting from French - less so in terms of vocabulary and more so in terms of grammatical structures. Certain things manifest themselves whenever I'm prompted to construct a sentence, like placing certain adjectives before the noun instead of after it, neglecting to drop the pronouns and, perhaps most egregiously, trying to copy the French yes-no question structure («Esta buena persona, es que ella habla español?» ). I don't hope to be fluent in Spanish in ten or so days, but if I could at least stop doing things like that, that would probably be great.

In other news I've finally managed to sit down and finish the last lesson in the Ingrian textbook. I was going to leave it at that, but then I thought that I could still mine the glossary at the end for example sentences. Since I switched the focus on Spanish I've slowed things down a bit in Slovene and Setswana, but at least I managed to complete the "written assignment" for tomorrow's group study session in the latter. Now to actually memorize the text..

[rdearman]

What!? We have to memorise the text too. OMG...

[vonPeterhof]

What!? We have to memorise the text too. OMG...

Wasn't that the point of language islands? Well, we can probably get away with just reading it out, but I'm still gonna have to at least rehearse it.

[vonPeterhof]

This past week I actually managed to complete several Hebrew lessons, on account of both having a somewhat less busy week and the last few lessons being a bit shorter (lesson 54 didn't have an excerpt from the Bible, so there were fewer sentences to mine). In fact I've already read through the final, 55th lesson, so all that's left there is to mine it for sentences. After I'm done with the book I'll start reading more excerpts from the Bible. As a compromise between reading the whole Hebrew Bible and just forgoing the reading entirely, I've decided to just read the parts for which I have readily available Old Church Slavonic translations (excerpts from this Old Bulgarian reader and a digitized Cyrillicized version of the Psalterium Sinaiticum). No complete OCS edition of the Old Testament survives in actual historical OCS manuscripts, so aside from the Psalms all you can do is use purpose-made learning materials (or personally translate Church Slavonic into Old Church Slavonic, like I've been trying to do until now). Unfortunately I probably won't be able to start on Syriac and Yiddish this coming week, as I forgot the books I got for them in Moscow, and I'll only be back there next Sunday, after my trip to Spain.

Speaking of Spain, I'm almost done with the Pimsleur Castilian Spanish course, but I haven't managed to do as many uTalk lessons I was hoping to. Since most of the tasks in there have visual cues and/or require saying things out loud it's a bit awkward to do those lessons during the commute or during downtime at work, and when I get back home I usually other things to do before getting to it. However, like with Ingrian the week before, I finally managed to pick Avar back up and now I have just one lesson to finish in there, not counting the collection of texts in the reader at the end of the book.

[vonPeterhof]

Unfortunately I probably won't be able to start on Syriac and Yiddish this coming week, as I forgot the books I got for them in Moscow, and I'll only be back there next Sunday, after my trip to Spain.

Well, looks like getting started on new languages should have been the least of my worries, as my schedule was so packed I hardly managed to do any sort of language study outside of reviews in Anki, Memrise and Lingvist. However, since my travels involved a lot of plane and bus rides, mostly without Internet access, I managed to do quite a bit of reading, finally managing to finish Murakami's Norwegian Wood, getting up to speed with most of the manga I'm currently following, as well as starting to read Volume 3 of 一週間フレンズ in Spanish (I've already watched its anime adaptation in Japanese and read the first two volumes in German).

As for the trip itself, I really liked it! I've basically spent a day each in Madrid, Cuenca and Burgos, walking around the landmarks and the quieter neighbourhoods, taking pictures, eating local food and stuff like that. My Spanish wasn't great, but most people I've spoken to were very accommodating, and not in the sense of "switched to English the moment I stumble over my words". For me Spanish has always been more of a "language that it would be nice to be able to speak" rather than a "language I really want to speak", but the experience of seeing Spain and interacting with both Spaniards and Latin Americans has made a strong argument in favour of keeping at it. Although when I go to Spain next time I think I'll be more interested in visiting places with their own regional languages. Already thinking of checking out Galicia..