ALTVM VIDETVR

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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Oct 01, 2017 9:13 pm

My trip to Estonia is happening in less than a week from now! While the budget will be a bit more shoestring than I would have liked I should still be able to see quite a bit - I'll be staying in Tallinn for two days, in Tartu for one day and in Kuressaare on Saaremaa island for another two days. I haven't really had the time to plan out an exact itinerary of things to see and do, but I guess I'll think of something.

It's a shame that my Estonian still leaves much to be desired, and I can't even honestly say that I've done my best, even in the past couple of weeks. Part of it is an overall shortage of study time, but even during that time I've mainly found Estonian competing for attention with Dari, with the latter increasingly winning out. I don't know if it's the burnout from trying to cram in as much Estonian as possible in a short period of time, the relative comfort of an Indo-European language that has done away with its declension system (the conjugations are alive, but seem fairly straightforward so far), the lack of the pressure to develop both active and passive skills in Dari, or just plain greater interest in the associated culture(s), but I've been struggling to work up the motivation to do stuff in Estonian (aside from listening to Metsatöll :) ). Yesterday and today I was trying to get through a revision section in E nagu Eesti and I found myself just reading the questions and immediately opening the answer section after each one, while at the same time thinking "I could be doing Dari right now".

I'm still looking forward to my trip, but actually getting to use my Estonian there is starting to seem like an impossible task. It feels like at this point my best hope is just to spend the remaining five days before the trip reading through a phrasebook over and over in the hopes that something will end up sticking.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Oct 22, 2017 10:21 pm

I'm back! Well, actually I've been back in Russia for more than a week now, but anyway. It's been an interesting trip with lots of walking in the rain, a little bit of talking in Estonian and just a single instance of nearly getting lost in the swampy woods of Saaremaa (long story). I was aware that Tallinn had a large Russian-speaking population, but I didn't expect to hear more Russian than Estonian in the city centre (to be fair, it's a pretty touristy area, so a large percentage of people there were speaking neither). The presence of Russian in Tartu and Saaremaa was noticeably smaller. I think the only conversation in Estonian I had where I managed to exchange more than two short sentences was ordering at a Subway in Tartu - though that's generally a conversation with a very predictable scenario, so not much of an achievement. I came back with two books - a second hand copy of Eno Raud's popular children's book Naksitrallid (I've read it in Russian as a child, though I can't remember it all that well right now) and a collection of poetry in the South Estonian languages. Sadly, the only learning materials for them I managed to find were some supplementary materials for a Tartu University course on South Estonian history and culture (which I felt bad about buying, as the students probably need them more than I do) and I didn't manage to work in a trip to Võru where one of those languages is still spoken by a significant number of people. Maybe next time.

Speaking of learning other Finnic languages, in spite of my burnout in Estonian I ended up getting massive pangs of wanderlust shortly after getting back to Russia, so I started reading the Ingrian/Izhorian self-learning textbook I got years ago. Ingrian is a highly endangered language indigenous to the areas around Saint Petersburg. In the area where I was born it was actually displaced by the Savonian dialects of Finnish in the 17th century, even before the area came under Russian dominance (there were still some mostly Finnish-speaking villages in the area back when my father was growing up). I've always been curious about the language, and now I guess I have a bit of a headstart in it. Ingrian is closer to Finnish than to Estonian, but the cognates are fairly recognisable and the grammar appears to be quite similar (there's another indigenous language nearby, Votic, which is much closer to Estonian). The biggest differences from Estonian are the presence of vowel harmony and the preserved word endings that make declensions and conjugations a bit more transparent, although the consonant gradation rules appear to be just as elaborate, if not more so. The lessons are organized as bite-sized chunks (which I do like) and prioritize demonstrating grammatical rules and variants via tables rather than example sentences (which I like a lot less). Still, it shouldn't be too much of a distraction from my other languages, and I don't have a real need to get to a high active level in it anyway. Maybe it can also serve as preparation for tackling Finnish at some later point.

I didn't really get much time to study other languages during my week off, but I've made a bit of progress in Dari since then. I've now completed lesson 20, which means that I'm now halfway through the DLI course's semester 1. Semesters 2 and 3 appear to be a lot more focused on the military matters, which I'm not as interested in, so I'll probably just do it for another 20 lessons. Hopefully I can move on to Hebrew before the end of the year.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Nov 05, 2017 9:44 pm

The DLI Dari Semester 1 lessons are organized into blocks of four lessons + revision. For the past three weeks I've managed to stick to the schedule of one such block per week, which means that if I can keep this pace up I'll be done with the lessons in another three weeks, before the end of November. The Anki reviews have started to pile up, but I'm not feeling burned out yet. In fact I'm tempted to try my hand at writing a small post in Persian on Lang-8. The main reason why I hesitate is that Lang-8 doesn't have separate tags for Dari and the Persian of Iran, so I could end up getting confusing correcting on things that work in Afghanistan but not in Iran.

I'm also still doing French (via Estonian), German, Spanish and Estonian (via English) in Lingvist, albeit without much consistency. Prior to my trip to Estonia I prioritized reviewing Estonian and French, but now I mainly try to do Spanish, both because it's my least familiar language and because I have been considering a trip to Spain (though it's not likely to happen until some time next year at the soonest). The cognate bonus from French and osmosis via certain bits of US media go a long way, but I am starting to feel swamped by the variety of verb forms. I should probably start paying closer attention to grammatical explanations, because all the non-present and non-indicative forms are starting to blur.
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Expugnator
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Expugnator » Sun Nov 05, 2017 11:34 pm

How do you use the lingvist Estonian course? I have trouble adapting to the format. Too many non-essential words introduced right away. Also, have they updated it beyond the basics?
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Nov 05, 2017 11:45 pm

Expugnator wrote:How do you use the lingvist Estonian course? I have trouble adapting to the format. Too many non-essential words introduced right away. Also, have they updated it beyond the basics?

They haven't. I don't think it was ever intended as a course for serious study, just a promotional gimmick tied in to the 100th jubilee of Estonia's statehood. And since I've already unlocked all 100 words ages ago and have mined the whole "course" for Anki sentences, nowadays my actual Estonian reviews in Lingvist are only about one to three words every couple of days. I only mentioned it for completeness' sake, really. Since I've sort of moved on from Estonian for now, if I considered the Lingvist course serious study I wouldn't be doing it :D
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Nov 26, 2017 7:14 pm

Even though I didn't really expect to, I actually managed to finish the DLI Dari course according to schedule! At this point my plan was to start reading Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat in the original Persian and translated into Karachay-Balkar from a book I bought some time earlier. However, this is apparently a trickier task than I thought. Since the poems were all numbered in the book I assumed that there was some sort of canonical order of Khayyam's quatrains. As it turns out, there's no such thing: it's likely that he never bothered to compile all of his poetry personally, and a lot of the poems attributed to him afterwards may not actually have been written by him. While Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald is probably the best-known compilation in the West, it's far from the only one, and the Karachay-Balkar compilation I have appears to follow a different order. All this means that matching the translation to the Persian original, or even to translations into English or Russian, will be a non-trivial task that may require more time than actually reading and translating the poems themselves. Right now I'm thinking of just reading the Persian poems and the Karachay-Balkar translations completely separately from each other.

As for the next leg of my journey through classical languages, Biblical Hebrew, I went and got myself a Russian translation of the classic textbook by Thomas O. Lambdin. Over the weekend I've gone through the introductory sections of the book preceding the actual lessons (unlike the original, the Russian version introduces the phonology and the orthography in parallel). I've had to think a bit about how to represent Hebrew pronunciation in my Anki cards, since on the one hand I generally try to represent the historically reconstructed pronunciation to the best of our knowledge, while on the other hand "Biblical Hebrew" covers a very large period with notable sound shifts throughout its history. In the end I've decided to stick entirely to the book's representation of Tiberian vowels and to slightly modify the representation of consonants to add extra distinctions for Heth and ʿAyin where they can alternate between [ħ] or [χ] and [ʕ] or [ʁ], respectively. This Russian website with a database of Semitic roots should help with that since looking at Arabic cognates gives a good idea which of the two variant pronunciations was used in a particular word originally.

Also, in yet another piece of wanderlust news, I couldn't resist installing zenmonkey's app for learning the Cherokee syllabary. Right now I'm purely interested in learning just the syllabary at a leisurely pace rather than diving into the language itself, but I can't give any guarantees about my future learning activities :D
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iguanamon
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby iguanamon » Sun Nov 26, 2017 7:38 pm

Just got caught up on your log, Vadim, since the storm. I am curious about your experience with the DLI course for Dari. What is your overall impression? I've done the Portuguese Basic and the Haitian Creole Basic courses and found the format to be quite different from the Dari one I saw on the jlu website.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Nov 26, 2017 8:06 pm

@iguanamon I did like it overall. I guess my favourite things about it were the abundance of texts and recordings (i.e. materials for sentence mining) and the parallel teaching of the literary standard and the colloquial language. The latter is especially appreciated since, from what I've heard, materials fully detailing the differences between standard Persian and the colloquial registers aren't terribly common, and the ones that do exist are nearly all focussed on colloquial Tehrani Persian rather than the Afghan or Tajik varieties. For a course aimed at the military the topics are pretty diverse, though the amount of military-related content does increase as you go further. The final sections of each lesson gradually easing the learner into authentic native material were also a very good feature.

What I didn't appreciate as much was the fact that the book largely does away with transliterations relatively early on. Some would probably like how that forces you to use your ears, but for me it was somewhat frustrating. In some examples it was really hard to hear the difference between /i:/ and /e:/ or between /u:/ and /o:/, and looking the word up on other sites doesn't always help since in many cases you'll only see transcriptions of the Tehrani pronunciation, where those pairs aren't distinguished. Also, for self-learners like us the inevitable downside of a course intended for classroom study is the large amount of content intended for facilitating classroom discussions that you can't really use on your own (although the teacher's book does have some extra useful sentences, and if you're used to doing the "self-talking" method you can still get a lot of mileage out of the cues for discussion).
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Josquin
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Josquin » Sun Nov 26, 2017 8:31 pm

Good luck with Hebrew! I guess you'll have finished the Lambdin textbook before me. ;)

I'm on lesson 30 right now and not very motivated to go on, but maybe that will change again.
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Oró, sé do bheatha abhaile! Anois ar theacht an tsamhraidh.

vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Dec 17, 2017 10:33 pm

I'm currently on lesson 12 in Lambdin's Biblical Hebrew book, and so far I'm hooked. I've tried to do the lessons every day, but due to other commitments I haven't managed to complete a lesson each day. For now I'm even motivated enough to do the writing exercises properly, although I imagine I'll soon be tempted to skip them. One thing I wasn't sure about initially was that the book seemed to take the opposite approach to DLI Dari and keep fully transliterating all the words until the very end of the book, but in the recent lessons at least the translation exercises aren't given in transliteration. This is good, as I was starting to feel like I'm relying on the transliterations too much and basically ignoring the actual Hebrew script.

Learning Hebrew while looking for Arabic cognates has inspired me to read up on the linguistic history of the Semitic languages. I've been surprised by how much more conservative Classical Arabic seems to be than Biblical Hebrew, even though their earliest attestations are more than a thousand years apart: a noticeably bigger consonant inventory, a preserved case system, dual number, a much larger number of nouns with irregular ("broken") plurals, etc. I thought I had had enough of Semitic morphology, but now I'm actually tempted to give Arabic another shot (with a better structured textbook), and also take a peek at Akkadian, Aramaic, Ge'ez or, if we move one level above Semitic into Afro-Asiatic, Ancient Egyptian. I'm sure this desire will wane as things get more complicated with Hebrew though :D
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