ALTVM VIDETVR

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Ezra
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Ezra » Tue Apr 02, 2019 6:48 am

PfifltriggPi wrote:Interesting, I'm also trying to resist Persian. My excuse is that I can't afford to buy the books. I have a friend who's family is Iranian, but she doesn't speak it, otherwise I probably would be learning it now.

Well, when it comes to excuses, mine is that to learn Persian one needs first to learn Arabic, and this is not something I have time and will to do now! :D
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Apr 07, 2019 9:57 pm

So I've been learning Hindi for a little more than a week now. I decided to finish all the script and phonology lessons first rather than doing all the lessons in order, as I want to nail that first. While having sped through those lessons means that I'm still confusing a lot of the consonants, the Pimsleur reading lessons are helping in solidifying the knowledge. So far the biggest hurdle in pronunciation are the aspirated retroflex consonants - I'm familiar with aspirated consonants and with retroflex consonants, but I've never had to pronounce anything that happens to be both. Schwa deletion also seems like it could be a problem.

In other languages, I'm finally done with lesson 26 in Syriac and the last lesson of the slovake.eu Slovak course, so I'm going to try to do Chechen more seriously starting next week. I've also tried to speed up my Setswana learning process by actually finishing a cycle per day rather than stopping at the daily target assigned by Memrise. Considering that I've also had a relatively busy week and still mananaged to do nearly everything I wanted to do language learning-wise, so far it seems like my schedule is sustainable. Hopefully I'm not jinxing it now..
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Apr 21, 2019 10:40 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:Hopefully I'm not jinxing it now..

Good job, me :roll: The first week after I said that I managed to do basically everything except for Syriac, and on the week that is ending now I had even less time on the weekend due to family commitments, so I ended up neglecting both Syriac and Chechen. At least I got a surprise lesson in Biblical Aramaic, as the passage that came up in the Old Bulgarian reader this week, Daniel 3, turned out to be originally in Aramaic rather than Hebrew.

Since I managed to complete the whole first lesson of Chechen last week, I have a slightly better idea of what I'm dealing with now, and I guess it's a lot less similar to Avar than I assumed it would be - apparently the most widely accepted date for the divergence between the Nakh languages and the rest of the Northeast Caucasian family is about 4th millennium BC, which is earlier than the estimated dates for all the splits of the Indo-European family. The good thing is that Chechen doesn't have the staggering number of locative cases that the Dagestani languages are notorious for. The downside is that instead of a simple 3 class noun class/gender system (human masculine, human feminine and non-human) the non-human nouns fall into four separate and mostly arbitrary noun classes which certain verbs and adjectives have to agree with in their prefixes.

In Hindi I've become quite a bit more comfortable with the script, although some of the ligatures still throw me off. I've mostly been focusing on the verb section of the beginner grammar lessons. Those are straightforward so far, but the past tenses that involve split ergativity are apparently left for the intermediate lessons. I'm hoping that being familiar with ergativity through the languages of the Caucasus will make that somewhat easier to wrap my head around though.

I've also tried to start watching Bollywood films to get some listening practice. Unfortunately the first movie I picked, the 1996 film Fire, turned out to be predominately in English, with Hindi used in just a few lines of actual dialogue, in addition to a couple of songs and an in-story theatrical performance of sorts. Can't say it wasn't interesting though! The only other Bollywood film I've seen before (assuming Slumdog Millionaire doesn't count) is Rang De Basanti, which certainly blew away a lot of the misconceptions I held about Bollywood. It was shown at an event at the international school I went to in England, where students were introducing films from their countries. I think the Chinese students were the ones who experienced the most culture shock from the movie's climax - the first question one of them asked after it ended was "is this based on a true story?" I'm thinking of checking out Omkara next, mainly thanks to this review from a few years ago.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun May 12, 2019 10:00 pm

I am now somehow done with the Learning Hindi lessons, and have only a few Pimsleur Hindi lessons left to go. In the meantime I've also started a trial period on HindiPod101 and done a few lessons on uTalk (it might have been a good idea for them to break up their usual "Numbers Up to Ten Million" lesson into several lessons, due to how the numerals in Indo-Aryan languages work). In the remaining couple of weeks I suppose it would be a good idea to focus on active skills, especially writing. I hope to write a few Lang-8 posts, and also do handwriting exercises (I've already started transcribing the Pimsleur reading lessons by hand).

I was surprised by how easy it often is to spot loanwords from Sanskrit in Hindi, even without having studied the former. Apparently the Indo-Aryan languages underwent a simplification of consonant clusters (for example, when going from Sanskrit to Pali: dharma -> dhamma, Tripiṭaka -> Tipiṭaka, etc.), so a lot of the more complex consonant ligatures only appear in loanwords from Sanskrit or English (the Perso-Arabic ones tend to be simpler and absent from the beginning of the word). Considering how tough those ligatures can be to crack (I remember doing a double take when I first saw the name सिद्धू), I hope there won't be that many of such words on the test :D

With the focus on Hindi I've greatly cut down my activities in most other languages, so I've only managed to complete one other lesson in Chechen and no new lessons in Syriac. At least I've been doing a bit of Setswana every day.

Oh, and I did watch the movie Omkara, so now I have its most famous song stuck in my head.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Jun 09, 2019 9:08 pm

Didn't mean to stay silent for so long, but the Polyglot Gathering was upon me before I knew it. But before going to Bratislava for the Gathering itself I had a brief Czech course over in Brno. The course was organized on coaching principles, meaning that we were asked a lot of questions on what we're expecting from the course, what our learning styles are and what feedback we can give on every stage. There were both topical and grammar-based modules, as well as challenges out in the city and general sight-seeing. Overall we did end up learning quite a lot given the short amount of time, even those of us who aren't native speakers of Slavic languages. Still, I don't feel like learning to speak Czech any further, as it's way too inconsistent and variegated compared to Slovak. I think I'll stick to reading in Czech, which is apparently an essential skill for a Slovak speaker anyway :D

At the Gathering itself I tried to attend as many non-English talks as I could, although due to having a somewhat busier evening program (i.e. going out to pubs more often) I ended up often being tired and attending fewer talks overall. Nevertheless I did listen to talks in French (about Belgian French), Czech (about the Sorbian languages), Yiddish (about the Kiribati language; the speaker would immediately translate nearly all the words absent from German into English, so it was pretty easy to follow), Spanish (about a certain learning style applied to learning Spanish) and Portuguese (about the history of the Tupi language).

Oh, and I got second place in the Hindi challenge. There were six participants in total and the tasks included writing the answers to five simple questions, discussing your answers with the jury and reading a few sentences off a tablet screen. One of the questions was "Why do you want to study Hindi?", and in order to keep it simple I wrote "Because I like Bollywood films". Naturally I got asked to elaborate, so I named all of the Bollywood films I had seen by that point; I didn't fully understand the followup questions, but I think I did eventually manage to establish my credibility by saying that Aamir Khan starred in Lagaan. I also struggled a little when asked about possible plans to visit India in the future; in the end I chose to say "I want to travel to India, but I can't at the moment" and I was a bit worried that the only way of sayin "can't" I could think of at the time was मुमकिन नहीं - literally "not possible", using the Arabic word mumkin. I was worried I'd get called out for using an "Urdu" word instead of a "Hindi" one, but I actually got complimented for knowing advanced vocabulary. But the most embarrassing moment was at the very end when they asked me how long I had been learning Hindi for. I tried to say "three months" - only to realize I couldn't remember the word for "month". I tried to restate it by saying "twelve weeks", since I knew that the word for "week" is the same as in Persian - only to realize I couldn't remember the word for "twelve" :oops: In the end I had to give up on answering that question in Hindi. Who knows, maybe that's what made the difference. Oh well, second place is also good I guess :D

After having come back to Russia on Monday I've spent the week trying to get back into my routine, which I guess I've sort of managed to do since I've finally completed a lesson each in both Syriac and Chechen. Next week I'll try to start preparing for the Polyglot Conference in Fukuoka by adding Korean into the mix.
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Brun Ugle
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Jun 10, 2019 6:56 am

How much do you regret your decision to stay with us? When you left, Rick said, “He’s never making that mistake again.” Rick and Dave can be a bit much sometimes. If only Zenmonkey had been there to keep them under control....
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Jun 10, 2019 6:07 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:How much do you regret your decision to stay with us? When you left, Rick said, “He’s never making that mistake again.” Rick and Dave can be a bit much sometimes. If only Zenmonkey had been there to keep them under control....

Nah, it's all good, I don't regret anything (the destruction of my umbrella was 100% my fault anyway :D ). Felt a lot like being a student and living in a dorm with other young people again. Which is a weird thing to say as I was the youngest one..
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rdearman
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby rdearman » Mon Jun 10, 2019 6:41 pm

Youngest, but least childish. :)
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Serpent
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Serpent » Tue Jun 11, 2019 2:42 am

vonPeterhof wrote: Portuguese (about the history of the Tupi language).
Who was the presenter? I know a Russian who shares my passion for Finnish, Portuguese and linguistics, and he's presented about Tupi at a language festival in Moscow.
Congrats on the second place :) did you know how to say ten weeks? :lol: :lol: :lol:
vonPeterhof wrote:Yiddish (about the Kiribati language; the speaker would immediately translate nearly all the words absent from German into English, so it was pretty easy to follow)
Sounds amazing.

Did they announce a Polyglot Gathering 2020 and where it would be?
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Tue Jun 11, 2019 5:11 am

Serpent wrote:
vonPeterhof wrote: Portuguese (about the history of the Tupi language).
Who was the presenter? I know a Russian who shares my passion for Finnish, Portuguese and linguistics, and he's presented about Tupi at a language festival in Moscow.
The presenter was a Slovenian named Urška Obreza.
Serpent wrote:did you know how to say ten weeks? :lol: :lol: :lol:
Yes, and damnit why did I not think of this? :oops:

Serpent wrote:Did they announce a Polyglot Gathering 2020 and where it would be?

They have. They're apparently returning to the "everything under the same roof" format of the Berlin gatherings, and the actual venue is this hotel.
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