ALTVM VIDETVR

[Serpent]

Aww, great that you're learning Finnish (the forum has a Finnish interface btw )

Negative particles being inflected by person still trips me up though, as I keep wanting to just use ei for all persons, like in Estonian.

Well, you can use it half the time Ei ole (ei oo) can be used for both third person forms, and the 1p plural can be replaced with the passive (me ei olla).

[vonPeterhof]

My language learning activities during the past two weeks have been somewhat undercut by me falling down and hitting my head on the way to work... for the second time in the last three years No cranial trauma, thankfully, just yet another scar above my left eye and a mild fever for all of last weekend. I've mostly managed to get back into gear this week though. I've even managed to resume doing the Setswana Memrise course (though I've yet to finish the "reading homework" for tomorrow's session..).

Another interesting difference between Finnish and Estonian that I forgot to mention last time is that it seems a bit harder to tell the difference between a and ä in the former. While phonological guides transcribe the letters in both languages as /ɑ/ and /æ/, respectively, to me it sounds like in Finnish the /ɑ/ isn't quite as back and the /æ/ isn't quite as front, both sounds thus tending towards [a]. I recall reading somewhere that it's easy to tell a Finnish accent in Swedish by the Finns' inability to pronounce the Swedish ä, which surprised me at the time, but now I think I understand where they were coming from. Thankfully that's usually not a huge problem, since vowel harmony can help tell which sound was meant to be used in many cases, but this is probably something to get used to through repeated listening (of which there's plenty in the FSI course).

[vonPeterhof]

Today, after having already visited both the Polyglot Gathering and the Polyglot Conference in other countries, I've finally visited the local language event that's apparently older than both of them, the Moscow International Language Festival, organized by the local Esperantists. While a lot of the people who attend those other events are also involved here, it's very different from them in many ways. For one, aside from a select few workshops, the default language of the presentations is Russian, which results in participants from outside the Russian-speaking countries a relative rarity (though there were quite a few). Introductions to languages make up the bulk of the presentations, as the main purpose of the event is to introduce the public to as many languages as possible, with the more general and abstract presentations on linguistics and language learning being secondary. Another noticeable difference is the immense business of the schedule: unlike the Gathering or the Conference, where you'll generally have three or four presentations running simultaneously in a program spanning a few days, the Language Festival packs more than a hundred presentations into seven 40 minute slots over a single day, with only ten minutes in between the timeslots.

Most of the presentations I visited were about minority languages of Russia (Meadow Mari, Altai, Bashkir and the endangered Finnic languages of the Leningrad region), which were mostly held in small classrooms and attracted a more targeted audience of language buffs and/or people somehow connected to various minority languages. One of the exceptions I made was the Finnish presentation, since that's a language that's currently relevant to me, and the audience for that one was a bit broader, including people with little experience with language learning as well as families with small children. Seeing that presentation actually killed my budding desire to do a presentation about Japanese (or another popular language) at the event at some point in the future, since this sort of audience, combined with the lack of dedicated moderators, resulted in the presentation getting periodically derailed by repetitive questions, which I don't think I'd be able to handle quite as well as the presenter did. If I'm ever doing a presentation I think I'll stick to something more obscure, like Classical Japanese Anyway, the day was a bit exhausting, but I did manage to hear interesting things about various languages and interact with language enthusiasts closer to home, so it was worth it. I definitely think I'll come again, though I'm not sure I'll do the whole day next time - skipping some or even most of the lectures is a very viable option, considering there's no entrance fee.

And here's the highlight of the Bashkir presentation I attended: a silly New Year song in a mixture of Bashkir and Russian that was apparently a local hit in the early 2010's.

(Here's a version of the song with somewhat better sound quality, but without the cheesy video. And here's a Tatar version with overall better production values, though with no less zaniness).

[vonPeterhof]

So with less than ten days left until my trip to Finland I've completed a Finnish Pimsleur course and four uTalk lessons, but I'm only halfway through the FSI course, and I've internalized even less information than that. The reason is likely that the course was paced to accommodate much more intensive study that I've been able to dedicate to it, especially while trying to at least make some steady progress in Syriac and Setswana. As a result the grammatical infodumps at the end of each FSI lesson largely end up just flowing through my head with little information getting retained. I remember the person presenting Finnish at the Language Festival saying that the large number of cases isn't a big deal, since the more cases there are the fewer functions need to be distributed between them. Well, that doesn't do much to help with the seemingly arbitrary nature of some of those function assignments, especially when a single function is assigned to different cases depending on the type of sentence it's used in, the presence/absence of numerals, which specific verb is used, etc. And no, the fact that Russian grammar is arguably even more arbitrary in this regard does help much either Anyway, I don't expect to be absolutely helpless in Finland without the language, but I would have liked to go there with better command of it and without still mostly thinking in it in terms of stock sentences rather than freely constructed ones.

[vonPeterhof]

Somewhat late, but Happy New Year, everyone! My trip to Finland was fun, even though I never managed to work up the courage to use any Finnish. I did speak Japanese, of all things, and I'm pretty sure it was with the lady mentioned in this article, the one whose love for the Moomins motivated her to move to Finland, learn Finnish and start working at the Moomin Museum in Tampere. Unfortunately, neither the museum's store nor the bookshop I went to in Helsinki had the original Swedish version of the Moomin novel I wanted the most, so the only book I ended up getting as a souvenir is a Finnish translation of Volume 4 of あずまんが大王

Last year was eventful for me in terms of travel and meetings, but perhaps a little underwhelming in terms of language learning. Plus, the idea to quit reading several books in parallel in favour of focusing on one book at a time mostly failed, as for a large chunk of the year I ended up not reading any (non-manga) books whatsoever. It wasn't until August that I actually started finishing books I'd been trying to read for a while. So the first thing I think I'll change this year is again allow myself to read several books in parallel, but also set the goal of reading at least a couple of pages of one of these books for each day of the week. I guess it could be one day each for a book in Russian, English, Japanese, German, Kazakh, Norwegian and one weaker language I feel like trying to read in at the moment.

Speaking of reading goals, due to certain recent controversial developments there's been a lot of discussion lately about the status of Russia's minority languages, which has made me want to offer at least some support to the media in some of those languages, if only in the form of regular clicks (my current living arrangements make it a little impractical to actually subscribe to their print editions). Online media for some of the bigger languages, like Tatar or Chuvash, appears to be in a somewhat healthy state, but for many others online news media is pretty much limited to a single state-owned newspaper's website. I've already been keeping up with the Dagestani Nogai paper Şöl tavısı, and now that I've finished the Ilya Frank Yiddish reader I may be ready to pick up Birobidzhaner Shtern, which is mostly in Russian these days, but tends to have at least one Yiddish article per week. Other papers I might at least try to skim with some effort could be Ḥaqiqat (Avar), Karjalan Sanomat (Finnish), Dərbənd (Azeri written in Cyrillic) and possibly other Turkic languages.

As for my goals for the year, while I would like to make it to both the Gathering in Bratislava and the Conference in Fukuoka (ideally also taking a side trip to Korea), it's hard to say if I'll manage to at this point. The visa requirements for Japan aren't what they used to be back when I first went there, but it's still a distant trip that I'd like to make the most of, meaning that I might have to cut down on other travel this year. So in travel-related language goals it seems like a good idea to focus on improving Slovak and Korean (plus I've been thinking of taking up Esperanto, especially now that I know someone I could practice it with semi-regularly), but I am a bit worried about dedicating time to projects I might end up having to discard due to financial reasons. Oh well, it's not like I'm actually learning languages in order to travel anyway (if anything, the opposite is more accurate).

And my Classical Languages challenge goes on, of course. Here's the sequence of classical and connected modern languages (for which I already have resources on hand) I currently have in mind for dabbling:

Classical Syriac + Turoyo
Babylonian + Modern Standard Arabic
Chagatai + Chuvash
Classical Sanskrit + Thai

Lineup may be change based on my whims and/or burnout

And finally, as usual, my top 10 anime of 2018 (including movies):

10. 進撃の巨人 第3期 Part.1/Attack on Titan Season 3 Part 1
9. ゆるキャン△/Laid-Back Camp
8. ヴァイオレット・エヴァーガーデン/Violet Evergarden
7. ゴールデンカムイ/Golden Kamuy
6. 恋は雨上がりのように/After the Rain
5. ゾンビランドサガ/Zombie Land Saga
4. ＨＵＧっと！プリキュア/Hugtto! Precure
3. さよならの朝に約束の花をかざろう/Maquia: When the Promised Flower Blooms
2. 宇宙よりも遠い場所/A Place Further than the Universe
1. リズと青い鳥/Liz and the Blue Bird

[vonPeterhof]

I've more or less developed a routine for now with regards to both language learning and reading. My current reading list is 君の名は。 Another Side: Earthbound (加納新太, Japanese), Pan (Knut Hamsun, Norwegian (Ilya Frank reader)), Колымские рассказы (Варлам Шаламов, Russian), Из века в век: словацкая поэзия (a collection of Slovak poetry with Russian translations), fragments from the Old Testament (Hebrew and Old Church Slavonic), a manhwa (Korean comics) anthology in German and the FSI Finnish course's graded reader. I was planning on taking time off Finnish for now, but I made a slight correction in my plans in connection to my reading of media in Russia's minority languages I mentioned in the previous post. Unlike the other minority language publications, the Finnish-language weekly paper from the Republic of Karelia Karjalan Sanomat isn't published electronically on its homepage, but its publishing house offer a digital subscription for its pdf version. I didn't hesitate to subscribe, but now that I've actually invested money into this I feel like I need to try getting to a level where I can actually read stuff. Hence my turn to the part of the FSI I had neglected before - the graded reader.

For Esperanto I dusted off my old lernu.net account, while also reading through Fundamento de Esperanto and following some Twitter accounts. One particularly interesting account I found is @eo_idiomoj, which is one of those Japanese language bot accounts that regularly tweets information about Esperanto idioms. For someone speaking a European language it might come as a surprise that Esperanto could even have idioms that need explanations, yet a lot of the things in Esperanto we take for granted are apparently not quite as obvious to speakers of non-European languages like Japanese. For instance, one recurring tweet is about the phrase "Mi ne komprenas vin" (I don't understand you), explaining that it's saying "I don't understand what you're saying" and not "I don't understand what you are". Another curiosity explained in the account is "gasti" (a verb derived from the noun "gasto", guest, meaning "to stay somewhere as a guest"), which isn't as much a European as specifically an Eastern European/Slavic thing (cf. Russian гость/гостить or Polish gość/gościć).

Other than that I'm still slowly mining the OCS and Ingrian dictionaries for sentences, doing the Setswana Memrize course, nearing the end of the Avar textbook, refreshing my Slovak with slovake.eu and uTalk and approaching the halfway point of the Syriac textbook (perhaps more slowly than I would like to). I'm not currently reading anything in Kazakh, but I am still watching the TV series Қағаз кеме. I also started rewatching the anime 魔法使いの嫁/The Ancient Magus' Bride dubbed into German. Crunchyroll's library of German dubs keeps growing, which sort of makes me worried I'll never feel the need to dive into native content

[Mista]

Another curiosity explained in the account is "gasti" (a verb derived from the noun "gasto", guest, meaning "to stay somewhere as a guest"), which isn't as much a European as specifically an Eastern European/Slavic thing (cf. Russian гость/гостить or Polish gość/gościć).

We have a verb like that in Norwegian, too - "gjeste" (noun: "gjest")

[vonPeterhof]

Not much to report other than the fact that I seem to have honed my routine even further and finally worked out the perfect amount for weekly visual media consumption: 16 anime series (of which 13 are ongoing, two are older series I'm watching for the first time and one is a series I'm rewatching in German), one live action drama and one movie. That way I manage to watch a bit of everything within a week.

Also, a recent trip to a bookstore resulted in me getting books for two more classical/ancient languages - Ancient Egyptian and Gothic. However, I've decided not to make any changes to the sequence from now on and just place the new languages at the end of the queue. As much as Ancient Egyptian interests me right now as a language related to the Semitic ones (not to mention the fact that Coptic would be a logical next step in my studies of Christian liturgical languages), if I keep doing this I might never get to Sanskrit.

[vonPeterhof]

Moving steadily along, getting a bit of everything done, and still not managing to fit in more than two units of Syriac in a week. At least I am halfway through the book and have finally reached the lesson where the book starts to introduce reading exercises in the ʾEsṭrangēlā script, which is the oldest variant of the Syriac script and one that's common to all Syriac Christian traditions, although its use is somewhat limited.

I've also finished the Avar textbook and now its place in my weekly schedule is taken by Afrikaans. Not only has my interest in the language been piqued by studying Setswana, but also the recent news stories about the debate in South Africa about its role in higher education have made me very interested in its sociolinguistics. For now I'm mostly using the book2 - English - Afrikaans for beginners course which isn't exactly the most in-depth resource out there, but hey, at least it's free I'm also occasionally trying to follow along with the media, mostly Maroela Media, as the Media24 family of newspapers all appear to be paywalled (the only Afrikaans daily from outside of South Afrika, Namibia's Republikein, appears to require registration, but on some devices it's totally possible to read the articles through their pop-up screen even without doing so). I even briefly considered making Anki cards for it exclusively in Arabic Afrikaans to add an extra challenge in addition to expanding my ʿajamī collection, but I haven't been able to find a freely available comprehensive guide to writing in this script. The Arabic Wikipedia article goes into the greatest detail, but even it doesn't reveal everything (for example, how exactly to spell the indefinite article 'n /ə/), and the provided examples show that the language as it was used in Arabic writing is pretty different from the modern standard, so rendering example sentences that way could be quite unnatural.

[vonPeterhof]

Korean has been on my mind for most of this week, specifically my community's endangered dialect, Koryo-mal (yeah, it's called "Koryo-mar" in the heading, but now that I think about it that strikes me as weirdly halfway between the standard form "Koryo-mal" or the form from the actual dialect, "Kore-mari"). First, I was at a small family gathering where the discussion turned to language. Both of my parents are only half-Korean, and their Korean parents were already highly assimilated, so it always surprises me when my more distant relatives recall having had passive understanding of their grandparents' dialect, or having cousins who had gone to actual Korean-medium schools in Uzbekistan. After that, by some weird coincidence, a popular Twitter account from the Japanese hobbyist polyglot community tweeted several links about Koryo-mal, specifically a short academic paper about its history and status back in 1986 and a 1993 documentary about a community in Southern Kazakhstan where Koryo-mal ended up becoming an inter-ethnic lingua franca. That paper is the most detailed description of the dialect that I've seen so far, and I'm now tempted to mine it for example sentences, even though the dialect has no literature to speak of and native speakers are hard to come by (the only ones I'm aware of among my relatives are a couple of 80-something grannies living in another country). I guess I could do that without distracting myself too much from my other studies by doing around a sentence a day (in fact I've already been doing the same with my other heritage language, Swabian, which admittedly has somewhat better prospects of survival as well as a tiny bit of written literature).

Also on the subject of Soviet Koreans, I've come across a website where scans of Korean community newspapers from all over the former USSR are posted. Most of them are either predominately or entirely in Russian, but of special interest is the Sakhalin weekly 새고려신문/Sae Goryeo Shinmun, which not only has a roughly equal number of articles in Russian and Korean, but also bilingual announcements for various events in the region - perfect for parallel reading and sentence mining! I guess I have another addition to my minority language media routine.