ALTVM VIDETVR

[vonPeterhof]

Somewhat unexpectedly for myself, I've managed to finish the Hakka book this week, at least as far as grammatical introductions are concerned. All that is left is a small annotated sample text (a phoneticians' classic, Aesop's The North Wind and the Sun) which I can mine for example sentences and then focus on Mandarin. Overall it's been interesting getting an introduction to modern Chinese via a non-mainstream variety to be able to compare and contrast later. Plus Hakka has the added bonus of convenient tone correspondence: three of the four Middle Chinese tones have been redistributed exactly the same way as in the Beijing dialect, which makes it easy to figure out the standard tones in a lot of words if you know the Hakka ones, and vice versa.

雖然亻厓聽毋識客話，日後亻厓愛這个糾正。但係，除忒歌曲以外，有麼个做得聽...

[vonPeterhof]

I didn't write an update last week as my family was busy entertaining guests from Germany - my grandmother's younger brother had decided to celebrate his 60th birthday in Saint Petersburg, so he and his wife were staying at my parents' place. They both emigrated to Germany from the former USSR, so that didn't really translate into an opportunity to practice my German. However, I did get some unexpected Norwegian practice during the week before at a reception at work. Okay, "practice" might be overstating it as it was mostly just the Norwegian attaché talking to me and me nodding, but I did understand most of what he said and managed to answer a couple of his questions.

Anyway, the spring season of anime is over and the summer season is upon us! This time around the critics over at ANN all listed the series they considered the best, the runner-up and the worst of the spring season, and it just so happens that all three of these categories for me are occupied by works that I've previously brought up on this log. Flying Witch might not have been a very ambitious show, but it pulled off everything it aimed for very competently, and it did actually end up featuring plenty of Tsugaru dialect, so an easy choice for the top. Concrete Revolutio was often too hard to get into due to the direction and storytelling not quite matching up to the thematic goals, but it was definitely the most ambitious show of the season and had plenty of interesting things to say about 20th century history and Japan's place in it. And Kumamiko, while always a somewhat uncomfortable watch, ended up dropping the ball in a way I had assumed slice-of-life anime comedies to be incapable of. It's a bit too early to give out recommendations for this season right now, but I do know what I'm looking forward to the most, and it's technically not even anime. After having left his mark on horror visual novels, urban fantasy light novels, magical girl TV anime, sci-fi cinematic anime and tokusatsu TV series, Japanese pop culture's most influential screenwriter Gen Urobuchi takes on... Taiwanese puppet shows. Yeah, I have no idea about those, but I can't wait to see him tackle new material once again.


I guess this is as good a segue as any to start talking about my Chinese-related language studies Even though I'm done with the Hakka book I haven't been able to let go of the language just yet, so I ended up translating a song:

I am an authentic Hakka
Hard-working and very assertive
The way ahead is arduous and billowing
One man fearlessly ventures forth

I am both generous and very passionate
Popular and trusted by people
I don’t run around squandering money
But my will to help out friends is true

The universally admired noble Hakka
Our laboriousness and family order are generally recognized
I am absolutely incapable of committing a crime
My morals are obvious to anyone

I built up my home thanks to noble hard work
There’s no question about my background
Very willing to expend money and effort
Hakka people are respected

I relied on moedict.tw, Wiktionary and Google Translate alot, so this may not be entirely accurate: the parts in italics are the ones I'm not entirely confident about.

I've also decided to redouble my efforts in Classical Chinese, as I've been really slow in reading the Three Character Classic (literally one or two quatrains per week), and if I don't finish it within a month I'll have to split my reading time between it, the Manchu soldier's diary and Aesop's fables. Thanks to yesterday's binge I'm done with about two thirds of the text, so it shouldn't take long now.

It's a bit funny that, even though this is supposed to be the European leg of my journey through Classical languages, I'm still spending most of my time on East Asian languages. In fact I feel like I'm neglecting my Ancient Greek studies quite a bit. While going through Chinese materials I add pretty much everything that contains vocabulary I'm unfamiliar with to Anki, whereas with Greek I often find myself making excuses: "Yeah I didn't recognize this particular form of a familiar verb when I first read it, but I'm sure I'll remember it now and won't make the same mistake again"; "I remember this root from modern Greek, so no need to add a new sentence just for this one word"; "I've never heard this word, but I was pretty close in figuring out what it meant from context, so why bother" etc. I tend to be more diligent with it when studying on the weekends, but I still end up adding fewer sentences than in any of the Chinese languages. Oh well, it's not like I was aiming for more than basic passive understanding anyway.

[vonPeterhof]

First off - Thunderbolt Fantasy is amazing! The fight choreography and the slick camera work enhanced by a combination of practical and CG effects at times make you forget that you're watching a puppet show and not a live action wuxia flick, and some of the characters introduced so far are already pretty intriguing. The language is pretty complex and stylized, but the story doesn't seem to hard to follow so far. And speaking of language, while the version streamed by Crunchyroll outside Asia is the Japanese one (Taiwanese and Mandarin versions are also being made), they did fit in a passage in Classical Chinese, read out with the Taiwanese pronunciation by the apparent arch-villain (the official website helpfully provides a Japanese translation). As for more conventional anime, with most of the premieres out of the way the overall season is looking pretty good, with exceptionally strong entries in the criminal drama and slice of life genres, as well as an unusual preponderance of female-targeted shows (at least one of which I found very promising). Plus, the show that's promising to be the season's greatest animation spectacle debuts tomorrow.

Even though I've been trying to keep up with most of the anime premieres I did manage to do everything in my language studies. I'll probably get into more detail about them next week, but I would like to bring up one thing I meant to mention last week and forgot. In my Mandarin studies I've been gradually getting more comfortable with the bopomofo transcription, so it's been interesting to note its differences from pinyin. For example, the contrast between the initial and the medial/final forms that we see in the pinyin pairs w-u, y-i and yu-ü is absent in bopomofo (ㄧ, ㄨ and ㄩ, respectively, in all positions), while the initial and final r's are contrasted (ㄖ for [ɻ-], ㄦ for [-ɚ]), and so are the e's (ㄜ for [ɤ] and ㄝ for [e], while [ə] isn't indicated as a separate vowel and is only implied in ㄣ /(ə)n/ and ㄥ /(ə)ŋ/). Also, the vowel [ɨ] (the pinyin -i following z-, c-, s-, zh-, ch-, sh- or r-) isn't indicated at all and treated as the absence of a vowel (I've even seen some pinyin-based pronunciation guides that outright state that "the i following z-, c-, etc. is silent"). While both systems were developed by Chinese scholars based on their own understanding of important phonetic distinctions, the fact that pinyin utilizes Latin letters likely meant that it was impossible for it to fully escape from the influence of foreign spelling conventions.

[vonPeterhof]

Finished the Three Character Classic yesterday, which means that my Classical Chinese studies are on hold from now on, save for Anki reviews and occasional sentences from Thunderbolt Fantasy (apparently those character introductions are called 念白 and they're a tradition borrowed from Chinese opera). The Three Character Classic is a very simplified introduction to Confucianism and Chinese ancient history meant for children, so it's an interesting window into the culture. However, its economic structure (quatrains consisting of three-character lines) means that it doesn't give many examples of more complex sentence structures, and the majority of unfamiliar characters ended up being parts of proper names, so it might have been better to go with a different text for deepening my understanding of the language. Anyway, I might try to read through other Chinese classical texts later on, but for now it's time to concentrate on other languages.

Speaking of other languages, apparently dropping Avar a month and a half ago didn't fully calm my Dagestan-inspired wanderlust. However, I found a somewhat safer avenue to channel it into - Nogai, a Kipchak Turkic language spoken in the far north of Dagestan and in the steppe regions further to the west. Thanks to its remarkable similarity to Kazakh I can already understand much of it so I can already read in it pretty well, and there's enough reading material in the form of two newspapers - the Dagestan-based Шоьл тавысы ("Voice of the steppe") and the Karachay-Cherkess Republic-based Ногай давысы ("Nogai voice"; note the different spelling reflective of a dialect difference). There are orthographic differences between Kazakh and Nogai, both those motivated by a different approach towards alphabet adaptation (the Nogai alphabet uses no letters that aren't used in Russian and instead relies on letter combinations as well as greater reliance on vowel harmony for allophonic cues) and actual phonetic differences (not all of the consonant shifts that distinguish Kazakh from most other Turkic languages happened in Nogai). The former differences are pretty easy to get used to, while familiarity with other Turkic languages helps with the latter. The vocabulary is very similar, with the most noticeable difference being the much more prevalent use of Russian loanwords, which actually makes things easier for me. I've always thought that it would be a good idea to learn an indigenous minority language of Russia to a high level, so why waste an opportunity when one of them is practically in my grasp already? Besides, the relative ease means I won't be diverting too much effort from my other languages.

For the past week I've tried to read one Шоьл тавысы article per day, mostly trying to figure out unfamiliar words from context and occasionally looking stuff up in an online dictionary (it only goes in the direction of Russian->Nogai, so I have to use an external search to find Nogai words; also, that url is really unfortunate...). It's been interesting discovering further small distinctions between Kazakh and Nogai, like the fact that one of the most common words for "and" in the latter is эм, apparently from the Persian هم, whereas the Kazakh equivalent һәм is apparently considered archaic. Also, not only did the /j/->/(d)ʒ/ sound shift not happen in Nogai, but there was apparently a reverse shift in at least some of the dialects: the word for Friday used in Шоьл тавысы is юма (yuma), which is derived from the Arabic جمعة (jumuʿa, cf. Kazakh жұма/juma).

[vonPeterhof]

Went to Saint Petersburg for several people's birthday parties last weekend, so I didn't have the time to update. However, I did manage to get stuff done over these past two weeks. Shortly after posting my last update I decided to speed up my progress through Mandarin Pimsleur by doing a lesson per day rather than per week. I managed to get into the rhythm by the end of the week, but the start of the following one brought a disappointment to this strategy in the form of broken headphones. Due to family circumstances I'm currently in penny-pinching mode, so I'm hesitating to buy new ones at the moment. This has meant that not only am I not able to do Mandarin during my commute back home, but also that I can't do Ancient Greek on the commute to work. Thankfully, Assimil lessons take a bit less time, so doing them at home wasn't much of a problem, but I did have to skip on Mandarin a couple of days.

By now I only have three Assimil lessons remaining, which means I'll be moving onto Latin, reading Aesop's fables in Ancient Greek and doing some reading in Modern Greek as well. As for Mandarin, hopefully I'll finish the first module of Pimsleur within the next couple of weeks, after which I should be able to concentrate on finishing the Manchu book. I'm still very much not over Mandarin yet, so I don't really want to drop it, but the following module of Pimsleur Mandarin doesn't have a convenient sentence-mining booklet, so studying from it should become a bit more time-consuming. Maybe I can think of some way to keep in touch with the language outside of Anki reviews.

As for languages outside the challenge, in Nogai news last week's issue of Шоьл тавысы had a very fortunate article - a translation of an interview Ramazan Abdulatipov, the head of Dagestan, gave to the Russian-language newspaper RBC. This meant that I could read a Nogai text with a readily available Russian translation. And in Japanese I've made an achievement that feels almost too trivial to mention. Usually when I read a Japanese book and encounter unfamiliar words I type them into my phone, which has two built-in Japanese dictionaries - a J-J explanatory dictionary and a J-E one with translations. In the past I would instantly dive into the latter one and just read the translation, but in the past couple of weeks I realized that this is no longer my first instinct. Not really something for a "professional" to be proud of, I know, but I remember that for the longest time whenever faced with a choice of reading some information in Japanese or in English/Russian I would think back to the old forum's skill-determining question about having no preference for reading in one's native language and would grudgingly admit that I'm far from having "no preference". So now I feel like I've crossed an important psychological barrier. まあ、これからも頑張らなあかんで（笑）

[vonPeterhof]

Assimil le Grec ancien: completed. It's a shame that they only dedicated the last lesson to Homeric Greek, as it would have been informative to learn more about the historical variations, but overall it was an interesting course. From now on my Ancient Greek activities continue with the Ilya Frank Aesop's Fables reader.

As for the modern language, I've decided against picking modern Greek back up. Just like with Manchu and Mandarin, I've decided to stretch the idea of a "strongly influenced" language in order to branch out something I'm interested in at the moment, which is the Caucasus. While picking Armenian back up was an option, I decided to go for a bit of Georgian, since I had wanted to try it out for some time (thanks in no small part to Expugnator's log). Additionally, my interest was piqued lately by the (now late) Fazil Iskander's novel Sandro of Chegem. While the book takes place in the author's native Abkhazia, there's a lot in there about Georgian-Abkhaz relations and the overall historical processes of the 20th century as they played out in the Caucasus. For my introductory resource I chose the Peace Corps Beginner Program. There's already a few things about the course that rub me the wrong way, from the factual errors in the introduction to the counterintuitive romanization used (not to mention the bizarre choice to top off the booklet with a photo of Stone Mountain in the other Georgia...), but hopefully the actual content will be enough to give me an idea of how the language works. I've only done the first lesson so far, and the alphabet already feels much less formidable than the Armenian one.

Anyway, my classical language challenge continues with Latin, picking up where I last left off in the Ludus Latinicus online course. This is a course that certainly doesn't spoonfeed the learner, as there are no explanations - just sentences, illustrations, texts and vocabulary lists. There is a gradual progression from very simple sentences whose meanings can be understood just by looking at the pictures to more complex texts that build on the previous material, so it's all pretty Krashen-like. While the individual lessons aren't very big, it seems like they'll be quite a bit more work than the Assimil lessons, so it might not be feasible to stick to the pace of a lesson per day, but I'll try to do at least something every day.

[Expugnator]

Yay Georgian! The best resources, even for just dabbling in the language, are in either Russian or Georgian. There is the intensive course in Russian which has audio and would be the closest to a dialogue-based course such as Assimil.

[vonPeterhof]

Done with Pimsleur Mandarin Chinese I, so that language is on hold for now. This time I'm putting a little extra effort into finishing reading the Manchu book. Recognizing the letters has become a lot easier, so now when reviewing the Anki deck I've shifted the focus to understanding the sentences rather than just being able to read them out. Since I'd been neglecting the former part that means that the number of reviews has started to pile up, but at least now it feels like I'm actually learning a language and not a cipher.

As for my main dish for now, Latin, after having done a couple more lessons it certainly feels a lot more familiar and welcoming than Greek ever did. Not sure it it's because of greater prior exposure, vocabulary osmosis through English or just the noticeably greater regularity and predictability, but either way it feels like I'm actually understanding more and more after every lesson, which wasn't always the case with Greek. I haven't managed to top the tempo of two lessons per week, so the projected time until completion of the available lessons is about three and a half months. If I can work in another long holiday I should be able to shorten that time somewhat, but there's no rush anyway.

Either way, the past couple of days I've already been preoccupied with what language descended from or influenced by Latin I should take up after I'm done. I've considered a number of options ranging from Basque to Haitian Creole, but in the end decided to stop on European Portuguese (sorry, iguanamon ). While I'm also strongly tempted by Spanish, Portuguese won out mainly because I've heard that the mutual intelligibility between the two is asymmetric in the latter's favour (also the main reason why I picked European Portuguese over Brazilian, even though my mental model of Portuguese pronunciation is currently closer to the latter). Besides, Portuguese gets bonus points for stronger connections to Japan, due to both being the first European language to come into contact with Japanese and the language of one of modern Japan's largest minority groups. But then, seeing as how I'm gonna be stuck with Latin for a while I might change my mind several times until then

[iguanamon]

Good choice! There are plenty of great resources out there to learn Iberian Portuguese and I've used quite a few myself. Obviously, in Europe, you're most likely to travel to Portugal. In Japan, you are most likely to run into Brazilian Portuguese. It's not that big of a deal, whichever one you learn, as long as you get exposure to the other regularly.

Some good, free, learning resources for Iberian Portuguese include: Centro Virtual Camões from Portugal and the Instituto Português Do Oriente out of Macao.

A good paid course (monolingual instruction) is Português sem fronteiras. Deutsche Welle has several hours of "radionovelas" (about 10 minutes long on a variety of subjects) with transcripts and mp3 audio available for free download on their Learning By Ear site. The English site has transcripts to make parallel texts. The Portuguese is Mozambican but close to Iberian proninciation and following Iberian grammar. If I can help you further, feel free to pm me. Boa sorte!

[vonPeterhof]

Obrigado, iguanamon! I'll be sure to check out those links later.

Obviously, in Europe, you're most likely to travel to Portugal.

I'm not so sure about that. On the one hand the flights are cheaper to Portugal, but on the other hand with Brazil there's no visa hassle, and that is a significant factor for me (not a huge fan of gathering documents and standing in lines). But then, at least the Portuguese embassy is literally on the same street as my workplace, so taking time off work to apply for a visa shouldn't be a huge issue..