ALTVM VIDETVR

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vonPeterhof
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Language Log: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1237
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sat May 05, 2018 9:27 pm

I dug around a little and found a couple more resources to help me convert my Kalmyk deck into the Clear Script - a grammar from 1847 and a dictionary from 1857. However, even with the help of those resources it's still a rather time-consuming task - I've basically spent the whole day today converting about 20 sentences (the ones scheduled for review today and tomorrow). If only those pdf files were searchable..

I also went to the bookstore yesterday and came back with three Ilya Frank books - one each for Basque, Catalan and Mongolian. Oh, plus the currently airing anime Golden Kamuy has reignited my interest in Ainu - though I'm trying to keep it in check by limiting myself to gradually unsuspending my deck and adding the occasional sentence from a Twitter bot (as well as practising sh*ttweeting in Ainu). Yeah, I may have a bit of a wanderlust problem. Have I mentioned that it's been a month and I still haven't completed lesson 44 of Lambdin's Biblical Hebrew? :shock:
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun May 27, 2018 9:41 pm

Just writing to report that I'm back from an extremely hectic business trip where I barely had the time to get half-decent sleep, let alone study languages. I thankfully didn't have any work this weekend, unlike some of my co-workers, but I've spent most of the time catching up on sleep, anime, manga and Lingvist reviews I've missed out on rather than getting back in the groove of studying Hebrew, Hungarian, Slovak or my poor abandoned Ingrian and Avar. Pretty much the only activity that I didn't put on hold was doing Anki reviews, which actually leads me to question my priorities and whether it's actually worth it to try to review stuff for most of the languages I've ever dabbled in. I've joked recently that my aim as a language learner is to know all the languages out there poorly, and ideally I wouldn't like to rule out the possibility of resuming studying any of my past languages, but I have to wonder if it's worth it to dedicate the time to just maintaining an ability to recognize very limited sets of words in highly specific contexts. My daily reviews average about 150 cards right now and the cards for languages I'm not currently studying actively probably make up more than a third of that number. I have resorted to mass suspensions when feeling swamped with reviews in the past, only to start gradually unsuspending cards shortly afterwards, so maybe this time a more radical approach is necessary. Oh well, at least I have two weeks off work now, so there'll be time to think it over.

Anyway, gotta start packing my bags for the Polyglot Gathering!
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vonPeterhof
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Languages: Russian (N), English (C2), Japanese (~C1), German (~B2), Kazakh (~B1), Norwegian (~A2)
Studying: Kazakh, Mandarin, Coptic
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Jun 11, 2018 11:06 pm

A few people have already written about what this year's Polyglot Gathering was like, so I'll be brief. It was fun hanging out with everyone, singing in karaoke (not particularly well), inadvertently making myself the butt of giraffe jokes (see Iversen's log for details on that one) and just enjoying the atmosphere. I'm pleased to report that I attended three talks in French this time and could generally follow them (as long as I paid 100% undivided attention), and also that I somehow managed to become a last minute participant of the Slovak challenge and ended up being the runner-up among native Slavic speakers. Unfortunately I can't say that I've actually spoken in more languages to people than I did last year, but that's something that can be rectified in the future - the informal Setswana challenge Rick started does sound enticing. This year's book haul was a bit smaller, but still quite interesting - collections of poetry in Hungarian and Occitan, a Slovak non-fiction(?) book I got as a prize in the challenge, a Slovene non-fiction book as well as a reprint of the Russian section of Zamenhof's Fundamento de Esperanto (couldn't resist buying it after seeing that it preserves the original pre-Revolution orthography).

I couldn't do much book studying during the Gathering either, but after coming back I've finally completed lesson 45 of Biblical Hebrew, finished translating one of the two fairy tales in the last lesson of Ingrian and finished converting my Kalmyk deck from Cyrillic into the Clear Script. I'm now really tempted to try converting my Hungarian deck into Old Hungarian runes, but that would involve manipulating with deck fonts, which is something I've never managed to figure out how to do (every explanation I find for how to do that leaves me asking "Um, are you sure you couldn't have dumbed that down a bit more? Or a lot more? Or do I just need to get a computer science degree to even try?" :D ). Still not entirely sure how and when (or even if) I'll be learning Setswana or Slovene, but I'll probably figure it out this week.
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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Sun Jun 17, 2018 10:35 pm

Dumêlang borra le bomma! Le tsogile jang? Leina lame ke Vadim. Ke tswa kwa Russia. Rôbala sentlê!

Okay, I've actually started learning Setswana now. I decided to use two courses out of those compiled by Rick in his log: the one from the Peace Corps and Mistry's An Introduction to Spoken Setswana. A lot of the courses available don't really go into tones in any sort of detail, whereas the former at least has audio I can check, while the latter marks the tones in writing whenever getting the tone wrong produces a different word (e.g. "am" vs. "is"). At first I tried following the Peace Corps lessons while checking the tones in Mistry's book whenever I wasn't sure of what I heard, but now I think it might be better to do it the other way round, doing the lessons in Mistry while checking out the audio for selected words in the PC course. Although there is a slight problem that the two courses appear to be based on two different dialects: the PC course introduces the letters e and o as having two distinct sounds each, [ɪ]/[e] and [ʊ]/[o], respectively, whereas the Mistry course never mentions this variation, meaning it's probably based on a dialect that only has [ɪ] and [ʊ]. The PC course also never uses the letter š and there are noticeable discrepancies in the use of the letters ê ([ɛ]) and ô ([ɔ]) between the courses, with the PC one using them a lot less (though I'm not sure if that's a genuine dialectal difference or simply transcription errors).

Anyway, I'm excited about my first serious foray into African languages! I mean, a Pimsleur Compact Swahili course doesn't count, does it? :D While Tswana lacks the wide variety and frequency of click consonants of Xhosa or the unusual phonology of its close relative Sotho, it should be interesting explore the Bantu noun classes and other grammatical features.
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rdearman
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby rdearman » Mon Jun 18, 2018 8:34 am

We're thinking about doing a weekly skype session to practice, talk about what we're doing, share tips and resources. I'll send you the information as soon (and if) we organise anything.
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brilliantyears
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby brilliantyears » Mon Jun 18, 2018 6:31 pm

Since you're one of the few people out there learning Ainu at least at one point): any tips on good sources? :D I started last week and am enjoying it a lot so far. I'm using the Unilang + STV course, but interested in other sources I might not know about.
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Brun Ugle
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Jun 18, 2018 6:54 pm

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vonPeterhof
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby vonPeterhof » Mon Jun 18, 2018 7:31 pm

brilliantyears wrote:Since you're one of the few people out there learning Ainu at least at one point): any tips on good sources? :D I started last week and am enjoying it a lot so far. I'm using the Unilang + STV course, but interested in other sources I might not know about.


There's also Sizen, though I'm not sure if they're still doing it at this point. As I mentioned in Sizen's log, I've only really studied from STV courses, but I've long had resources of The Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture bookmarked, like their collection of multi-level courses in various Ainu dialects. They also have anime based on Ainu folklore (with arguably better use of CGI than in Golden Kamuy ;) ). The Topical Dictionary of Conversational Ainu also looks like an interesting resource, with topic-based modules of words and sentences, complete with audio recordings by a native speaker of the Saru dialect (I haven't really used it much, mostly being familiar with it through its unofficial Twitter bot).

@Brun_Ugle Ke tsogile sentlê, ke a leboga. Sefane same ke Thutlwa :lol:
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rdearman
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby rdearman » Mon Jun 18, 2018 7:58 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:@Brun_Ugle Ke tsogile sentlê, ke a leboga. Sefane same ke Thutlwa :lol:

Wow! Impressive.
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brilliantyears
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Re: ALTVM VIDETVR

Postby brilliantyears » Tue Jun 19, 2018 8:23 am

vonPeterhof wrote:
brilliantyears wrote:Since you're one of the few people out there learning Ainu at least at one point): any tips on good sources? :D I started last week and am enjoying it a lot so far. I'm using the Unilang + STV course, but interested in other sources I might not know about.


There's also Sizen, though I'm not sure if they're still doing it at this point. As I mentioned in Sizen's log, I've only really studied from STV courses, but I've long had resources of The Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture bookmarked, like their collection of multi-level courses in various Ainu dialects. They also have anime based on Ainu folklore (with arguably better use of CGI than in Golden Kamuy ;) ). The Topical Dictionary of Conversational Ainu also looks like an interesting resource, with topic-based modules of words and sentences, complete with audio recordings by a native speaker of the Saru dialect (I haven't really used it much, mostly being familiar with it through its unofficial Twitter bot).
Thank you, this is helpful! I'm constantly amazed by The Foundation of Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture website.

I've started looking around my library for Ainu resources (mostly old dictionaries and grammar books). I found a title by Yukie Chiri that is bilingual Japanese and Ainu. It's old-ish (and obviously it'll take a while til you get to that level of proficiency), but also available for free through Aozora :)
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