ALTVM VIDETVR

[vonPeterhof]

This has been the first week in a while where I've managed to do something in all my languages, though not quite as much as I would have liked in some of them, most notably Old Norse. I haven't quite managed to get as far as I was hoping to in Persian either - still going through the DLI course's introductory lessons that introduce things like the alphabet, numerals, colours, etc. While I haven't exactly reached the part where the course starts giving complete sentences - the closest thing so far are phrases like ده هليکوپتر سفيد "ten white helicopters" - I've started adding sentences from a Twitter bot. The design of the cards has the Dari/Persian sentence on the front and a translation plus a transliteration on the back. For the transliteration I decided to use the Tajik Cyrillic script instead of a Romanization, in order to get used to the script and perhaps be able to read that Persian variety later. While the Tajik vowel inventory isn't identical to that of Dari, it does match Dari a bit closer than it does Standard Iranian Persian (let alone colloquial Tehrani Persian, which appears to be what the Twitter bot's transliteration scheme is based on). Tajik doesn't have phonemic vowel length, but since the Classical Persian /a:/ has shifted to [ɔ(:)] (spelled as ⟨о⟩) and /oː/ to [ɵ(ː)] (spelled ⟨ӯ⟩), this leaves only the pairs /u/-/uː/ and /i/-/iː/ ambiguous (there is the letter ⟨ӣ⟩ for the historical /iː/, but it's only used word-finally). This isn't a problem in most cases though, since vowel length can usually be seen in the original spelling in the Arabic script. If I do run into ambiguous cases, they can be worked around by using modifying the script, like using ⟨ӣ⟩ outside of the word-final position, or adding something like ⟨ў⟩ to distinguish /u/ from /uː/.

Anyway, off to Bratislava in a little more than a day! Teším sa na všetkých, ktorí prídu na stretnutie!

[vonPeterhof]

The Polyglot Gathering ended two weeks ago, and it was definitely an interesting experience. It was very fun meeting people from the forum in real life, listening to others' experiences and just interacting with people who don't find being interested in obscure languages the least bit weird. I do feel like I "underperformed" in terms of actually speaking languages other than English and Russian (and Japanese, I guess, though I wasn't exactly seeking out opportunities to speak it, seeing as how it's my everyday language at work). While I did attend and understand several talks in German and had a few conversations in that language, my German has become very rusty and most of the time I felt too self-conscious to use it. Didn't manage to speak a whole lot of Slovak either. While I generally don't learn languages with the explicit goal of actually speaking them, not being able to actually speak as many languages as (seemingly) most of the other attendees did feel frustrating at times. I think that if I ever go to another one of these Gatherings (which I do want to do, but likely won't be doing next year) I'll need to at the very least A) polish my German enough not to get embarrassed by it, and B) get conversational in at least one Romance language, as not having one on my badge really made me feel like I stand out (though I did manage to keep up with a couple of conversations in French and interject in English; I also told a few Spanish speakers that I "solamente hablo um pouco de português", that probably counts for something ).

I came back home with plenty of reading materials in several languages, though my book shopping spree in Bratislava didn't go quite as well as planned. I wanted to buy some manga translated into Slovak as well as some learning materials for Hungarian in Slovak. The former didn't work out as all the manga that was sold was in Czech, while the latter was surprisingly hard to come by. The only thing I managed to find was a 3-in-1 combo of a dictionary, a phrasebook and a grammar guide. Probably isn't the best kind of learning material, but at least something. Other than that I got novels and non-fiction in Slovak, German, French, Turkish and Korean, as well as manga and manhwa in German and an introduction to the Viennese dialect.

As for my studies, I've decided to give extra focus to Estonian, given that Estonia is a country that would be relatively easy for me to travel to before my current Schengen visa expires. I decided to go back to the beginning of E Nagu Eesti and do all the lessons all over again, this time actually doing the exercises properly rather than just mining the book for sentences. I've also started using the questions at the end of each unit to write brief passages on lang-8. I won't be doing Slovak lessons now, but I will be reading a Slovak translation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Remains of the Day (which I've read in English, albeit almost ten years ago). With DLI Persian I'm still slowly making my way through the introductory lessons. Hopefully I can pick up the pace starting next week.

[vonPeterhof]

I swear I never intend to make these month-long pauses, it just sort of happens on its own! These past four weeks varied quite a bit in terms of my productiveness, both thanks to bouts of heightened activity at work (had to work both Saturday and Sunday the other weekend) and the start of the new anime season. Still, I've managed to start the proper Dari lessons and have just completed the fourth one. While it's hard to assess the full complexity of the verb conjugations at this point, so far everything seems a lot more manageable than in Arabic. The incremental presentation of both grammatical and lexical information certainly helps as well.

Other major news in the last four months is that I've discovered Lingvist. It seems like exactly the kind of low-effort active practice that I need to refresh my German and French vocabulary without taking away too much time from studying other languages. Plus it's of assistance in learning Estonian, since it's possible to learn French through that language - and also it just so happened that shortly after I picked up Lingvist they added their Essential Estonian mini-course. Sure, it's just 100 vocabulary items, but every little helps. I even got so carried away initially that I ended up picking up Spanish just for the heck of it, but trying to do all the courses every day turned out to be a little unsustainable, so I decided to do that one only whenever I have time to spare.

Also on the subject of Estonian, I've discovered one serious limitation of the book's "no explicit explanations" approach - the paucity of information about correct pronunciation. I mean, I can understand the argument that you're supposed to get that information from listening and not from reading about it, but at the very least it would be helpful to get an explanation of what I'm supposed to hear, especially when it comes to the more unusual features of the phonology. Like, even though there are a lot of cases of palatalized consonants not reflected in the spelling (e.g. the /nʲ/ in "hunt"), but I can hear those clearly due to being familiar with palatalization from my first language. The same isn't true for suprasegmental length, which looks like a highly unusual feature and something that can be hard to wrap one's head around without clear examples. I can now hear that single p, t and k between two vowels are geminated ever so slightly after having read that this is the only case where the three-level consonant length is unambiguously reflected in the orthography (b, d, g = short; p, t, k = long; pp, tt, kk = overlong), but I can't really hear a distinction in any of the other cases. It's especially frustrating in that the book does appear to allude to this phenomenon, but in a very confusing manner: whenever a new noun or adjective is introduced it's given in the nominative, genitive and partitive cases, and sometimes you'll see it displayed like this:

tool
tooli
tooli

Since none of the symbols are explained in any form I can only surmise that the presence or lack of underlining reflects a long/overlong distinction since, as the Wikipedia article says, "Single-syllable words are always overlong, if they have a long syllable". That doesn't tell me what the bolding of the third word means (if anything at all), and, since there isn't an isolated audio recording of the three forms side by side, there's no easy way for me to find out. Shadowing isn't normally part of my routine, but it looks like it's my only hope to develop even a remotely natural-sounding pronunciation in this case.

Ranting aside, I do feel like my comprehension has improved a lot, and even active skills as well. Thanks to near constant repetition in the exercises my present tense verb conjugations are pretty much flawless, and while I still often have to rack my brain a bit for the numerals it's become much less of a chore. I do feel like I still need to do a lot more work on the noun declensions, and it seems like writing brief lang-8 posts based on the questions at the end of each unit just won't cut it. I think I should try writing longer and more "free-form" posts while doing fewer dictionary lookups.

[vonPeterhof]

The pace of my studies is still not quite as fast as I would like it to be, but I'm moving forward I guess. I just finished lesson 8 of DLI Dari and have finally caught up to where I left off in Estonian before I decided to restart (lesson 14). While restarting has certainly helped me solidify my vocabulary and gain better command of verb conjugations and numerals, the progress for noun declensions is barely noticeable, to the point that I feel like entirely giving up on even trying to master them. Sure they're not as irregular as to require memorizing a separate pattern for every single word, but still, the number of those patterns is pretty damn demotivating.

With respect to other classical languages I've done before, I've decided to suspend the reading exercises for all of them aside from Ancient Greek (which means Latin, Arabic and Old Norse), since that was becoming very time consuming. In fact I went so far as to suspend the Arabic Anki deck, as the number of reviews just didn't seem to become more manageable. Not sure if it's the language itself or the methods that I chose for it, but for some reason not much information about it sticks in my mind. Maybe I'll try again later.

In news somewhat related to Arabic, I've recently started switching my Avar deck to the Avar Arabic alphabet (Ajam). I had been assuming, by analogy with Abkhaz, that writing in Avar had been irregular and sporadic prior to the Soviet era, but it turns out that the situation was more similar to that of the Turkic languages. A more or less stable writing system had been in use for centuries, and prior to the introduction of the Latin alphabet it got standardised and simplified. While it's not in official use anywhere nowadays, some enthusiasts do still use it in some capacity (there's even at least one blog written in Ajam together with Cyrillic). I've yet to find an efficient way of typing in Ajam, as there are a few letters not used in Arabic, Persian or even Pashto, so right now I'm managing by copy-pasting letters from the Avar Wikipedia article on Ajam. Oh, and in addition to this and learning Dari I've also resumed reading occasional practice in Kazakh, Uzbek, Azeri and Uyghur in their Arabic script variants, and have also unsuspended my BCMS Anki deck which includes sentences in the Bosnian Arabic script. Just give me a decade and I'll be able to read every language that's ever been written in the Arabic script... except, apparently, Arabic itself

[vonPeterhof]

I've found a bit of a remedy for my Estonian woes on the website of the Moscow State University professor Mati Pentus (he's a math professor, but he is originally from Estonia and apparently a bit of a language buff). Namely it's the pronunciation and morphology guides, as well as an overall introductory summary of the grammar (the last one apparently only in Russian). I've only finished reading the first one so far, but a lot of my questions about suprasegmental length and stress in Estonian have been answered. I'm still thinking about how to make good use of the information about the cases in the morphology guide (might try using the "deep learning" approach as outlined by Bartosz Czekała in his presentation at this year's Polyglot Gathering), but I guess the Estonian case system doesn't seem quite as intimidating any more. Getting simultaneously introduced to Avar and its 4×5 grid of locative case( form)s also helped put things in perspective..

In other news, it's recently been officially confirmed to me that I'll be going on a two week business trip to Vladivostok near the end of the month. Not sure if this is a good enough excuse to try to reactivate my Mandarin and Korean, but it's not like I've ever needed legitimate excuses to give in to wanderlust

[Expugnator]

Fantastic!! I'm adding this to my study schedule right away. It's great to have an experienced learner help when we are stuck at a topic, like the tricky Estonian case system. Now I have faith in humankind and in my ability to understand this morphology.

[vonPeterhof]

Aw, thanks! Although I'm not sure if my experience had anything to do with this, as I just happened to run into that website while searching for something else (I was hoping to find some Estonian declension drills ).

[vonPeterhof]

Writing an update on a Saturday night, as this time tomorrow I'll be on a plane to Vladivostok. Plus it's only fair since I didn't write one last week. Anyway I've fully given in to East Asian wanderlust (do we still call it "wanderlust" it's only towards places one has already been to?) by doing Pimsleur Mandarin II and Korean I every day, and also unblocking several more cards from my Manchu deck (after all, it's the language closest to the historical indigenous languages of the Vladivostok area). It actually took a bit of effort to resist going all out and picking up a bit more Vietnamese Oh, and just for the heck of it, in Korean I'm also mining sentences in a textbook called Let's Learn Korean, which was published in North Korea in 1989. There's a lot of curious differences from standard South Korean, though it seems like the idea that the North has purged or significantly diminished the use of Sino-Korean words is a massive exaggeration, if not an outright falsehood. The impression is also supported by looking through the DLI North Korean lessons on GLOSS, some of which are based on very recent native material (from the Kim Jong-un era), so it's not just the matter of the book being outdated.

I tried not to let the above distractions cut into my routine in other languages too deeply, but I can't say I've succeeded at it. The only significant thing I've done in non-East Asian languages is create a separate Anki deck for Estonian declension. In the end I decided not to pursue the "deep learning" approach and just used the materials from Mati Pentus' website to make simple cards where the front displays a word (noun, pronoun or adjective) in the nominative and the Estonian name of a case, while the back displays the word in that case. It's now the deck with the biggest number of reviews for me, with 38 reviews due today without counting 20 new cards. Turns out that the biggest headache of Estonian declension isn't either of the singular genitive or partitive, but the partitive in the plural, as that one seems to have the most variation and the least predictability, at least among common words.

I've also recently noticed a couple of interesting similarities in the grammars of Avar and Japanese (more so Old and Classical Japanese than Modern). Something that's been mentioned in the book early on is that Avar has a three-tiered system of demonstrative pronouns - instead of just having a "this"/"that" dichotomy between things that are close and things that are far, the distinction is three-way between things close to the speaker, things close to the listener and things that are far from both of them, just like in Japanese. What's more, similarly to Old Japanese, there are no separate third person pronouns and the aforementioned demonstratives double as personal pronouns. The most recent lesson also introduced how adjectives work, and just like in Old Japanese rather than having a comparative form of the adjective comparisons are made by changing one of the nouns into an ablative form - in the case of Avar specifically the superablative noun case (literally denoting movement away from the position on top of an object). For example

عالێ مۇساداسا كۇتاكاو وۇڬۈ / ГІали Мусадаса кутакав вуго (ʿali Musadasa kutakaw wugo) = Ali is stronger than Musa (lit. Ali is strong from [top of] Musa)

Translating the sentence into Classical Japanese would give something like this:

アリイハムウサアヨリ強シナリ (Arii-fa Muusaa-yori tuyosi nari), where yori can also meand "from", "off" or "away from". Technically it can still have all these meanings in highly formal modern Japanese, but otherwise forming comparisons has become its primary function, with the ablative function taken over by kara.

[vonPeterhof]

I'm back from Vladivostok. While I didn't really manage to practice my Korean or Chinese there (aside from a couple pleasantries with a Korean waitress), there certainly were a lot of opportunities for that, given the very large number of Chinese people there and a surprisingly large number of Koreans, both Southern and Northern. Although I hardly saw any Japanese people there, of course excepting those I was working with. I checked out bookstores in the city hoping to get something on Asian languages, but ended up walking out with a brand new Ilya Frank book on Galician, complete with a grammar and phonology guides and a photo collection. I also picked up a copy of the Epoch Times newspaper in Chinese from the hotel we were staying in, though my ability to read it is somewhat limited right now. Still, can't say I came back without souvenirs There wasn't really enough time to do all of my studies, especially in the second week of the trip, and I didn't manage to catch up during the weekend due to being exhausted and jet-lagged out of my mind. At least I did manage to write a lang-8 entry in Estonian for once. I'm gonna need to concentrate on it now that my trip to Estonia is likely going to happen about a month from now.

[overscore]

While I generally don't learn languages with the explicit goal of actually speaking them, not being able to actually speak as many languages as (seemingly) most of the other attendees did feel frustrating at times.

Well yeah, tell me about it. I already feel like the village idiot around here with only crappy German and non-N1 Japanese I can order a bowl of rice in Khmer.
I couldn't care less about romance tongues, maybe Romanian, but if I did I would go Iversen's way and master them all in the multiconfused way.
I was going to go the the conf in Budapest but in the end got lazy and it didn't happen. I did make it to Budapest though, lol. Overstayed for another month, cause it's a cool place.