Neoplanta log - German, French, Arabic, Urdu etc.

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Saim
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Sat Dec 05, 2020 6:23 am

nooj wrote:How do you deal with the lack of standardisation? Do you just choose one dialect or do you learn them all?


Mallacán is made up of new speakers and so their lyrics are in the sort of "Standard" Aragonese common in activist circles and writing.

Initially I'll focus initially on this form of Standard Aragonese. I also have a story book for children that is written in both Standard Aragonese and one of the natural dialects, so that'll be a good stepping stone towards the dialects. But I'm mostly just dabbling so it'll be a while before I get there.

Occitan is more internally diverse than Aragonese and I don't feel like I had much trouble understanding different dialects there either, with the exception of some Gascon dialects (and there I think the mistake was not doing enough explicit vocabulary study, which I do a whole lot of nowadays). Aragonese is also pretty well-documented and there are lots of resources describing the different dialects available online, I don't think it'll be a huge issue.

As for the spelling system, I see most people using non-etymological spellings, and even though I'd personally be an advocate of the more etymological system I don't have any trouble understanding it.
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Sun Dec 06, 2020 10:23 am

Saim wrote:I couldn't figure out what escrate, is supposed to mean, my best guess would be explode or collapse or something (es. pete, estalle, se reviente).


Looking back at this now, I'm not sure what was confusing me here. Catalan has the same word: esclatar. This is just that with l > r.

Siñal d'o sabotache, ta que o sistema escrate.
ca: senyal del sabotatge, perquè el sistema esclati
es: señal del sabotaje, para que el sistema estalle

This word is registered in the Dizonario breu in a form identical to the Catalan word, namely esclatar.

1. Rabentar, petar: Infló tanto o globo que l’esclató en os morros. // b.tr. 2. Dizir-le á beluno bella cosa que no li cuaca u que li sosprende: Malas que plegó, li esclató a notizia.

I don't know where Mallacán got escratar from. Aragonese seems to have ra as a variant of the article a (which is la in many dialects) after vowels, so maybe there are other places where you can get l > r. Maybe they took it from a natural Aragonese dialect, or maybe it's some sort of hyper-Aragonese form like when people in Galicia say crase instead of clase (but then again l > r happens a lot in Galaico-Portuguese --- praza, praia and so on -- I can't find any other examples of it in Aragonese...).
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Mon Dec 21, 2020 9:34 am

Serbian

Image
O psovanju - Predrag Krstić, 125 pages

A book about swearing, comparing Serbo-Croatian swearing with other languages (mostly English and the Romance languages), primarily in terms of their pragmatics and etymology, as well as discussing puristic attitudes towards it. Also doubles as a pamphlet that defends swearing use.

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Fiction

Ana Marija me nije volela - Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović, 184 pages
Javna ptica - Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović, 303 pages
Uho, nož, grlo - Vedrana Rudan, 172 pages
Mundo libre - Marko Krstić, 232 pages
Ostrvo - Meša Selimović, 198 pages
Sjećanja - Meša Selimović, 256 pages
Američki derviš - Ayad Akhtar, 354 pages (translated from English)
Glad - Mirjana Bobić Mojsilović, 224 pages
Derviš i smrt - Meša Selimović, 369 pages
Ono sve što znaš o meni - Mirjana Bobić Mojsilović, 235 pages
Tvrđava - Meša Selimović, 373 pages
Niko i ništa u Parizu i Londonu - George Orwell, 180 pages (translated from English)
Neoplanta ili Obećena zemlja - Végel László, 257 pages (translated from Hungarian)
Dvojnici iz tame - Morea Banićević, 282 pages
Elitna prostitutka - Jasmina Ana, 192 pages
Lutkar - Jostein Gaarder, 235 pages (translated from Norwegian)
Bljuzga u podne - Predrag Ličina, 243 pages
Roman o Londonu (Prva Knjiga) - Miloš Crnjanski, 388 pages
Paunovo pero - Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović, 497 pages

Non-fiction

Nova lica jezika, Ranko Bugarski, 250 pages
Mađarska revolucija 1956 - Ivan Ivanji, 325 pages
O psovanju - Predrag Krstić, 125 pages

Total fiction: 5174
Total books: 5874


Urdu

I've pretty much entirely switched over to Memrise for Urdu. I'm going to try to do 5-10 new cards per day. For now I'm mostly reading opinion pieces on nawa-i-waqt, and I do use Google Translate as an aid sometimes. I make my goal looking up a certain number of new words rather than finishing any given article.

I think I'll go back to fiction and monolingual sentence cards once the new words in these texts start thinning out. For now opinion pieces still have a huge amount of new words for me, so that should keep me busy for a long time.

Mandarin

I've restarted Heisig in Anki. I think the problem the first time around was that I did way too many cards (like 10 or more...) per day so I would be "done" with it as soon as possible, but that just wasn't realistic or a particularly useful goal. For now I have enough material with soft-coded subtitles and online texts, but in a couple of years it'll be very useful to understand character components well enough to look up words from print materials or hard-coded subtitles.

I limit new cards to 3 per day, and add 1) colour representing tones, 2) audio from forvo, 3) stroke orders from visualmandarin.com. On Anki I'm only doing recall, but I'm also going through a Heisig deck on Memrise to cover the recognition part.

I'm not really doing mnemonics, so I'm just using the order rather than the actual method.

If I can keep up the rate of 3 per day, that's more than a thousand per year, which is pretty good given my goals and the amount of time I'm willing to commit to this. Let's see if I can maintain it over time.

Besides this, I'm trying to add 5 cards to Memrise per day. These are word cards drawn from audiovisual input with soft-coded subtitles.

Portuguese

Portuguese has become a major focus. I've been using the TV show Coisa mais linda as my main source of study material, although I'm planning to read some novels soon as well. I've set new cards to 5 per day, like Hungarian.

I've circled back to making monolingual sentence cards with audio even for Romance languages, because why not? It takes more time than other flashcards but they're very useful and so it's good to churn out a batch of them when I have some extra time and can sit and watch/study for an hour or so, especially now that I'm limiting new cards to 5 per day for Portuguese and 1 new card for everything else. (edit: when I say “everything else” I mean other Romance languages; Hungarian and Polish are also at 5 a day).

Polish

Polish is also set to 5 new cards per day. I'd like to bring it to a point where I have the same ease and comfort of reading as when reading Serbian.

Having so many languages at 5 new cards per day probably isn't sustainable in the long term but if at any point I start feeling it's too much I'll scale back one or two of them. For now I'm enjoying it a lot.
Last edited by Saim on Mon Dec 21, 2020 5:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby nooj » Mon Dec 21, 2020 4:17 pm

I'm sure you've seen this before but just in case you haven't there is a vast collection of audio/video of Aragonese dialects in the Archivo audiovisual de l'Aragonés youtube channel.
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Saim
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Mon Dec 21, 2020 5:10 pm

nooj wrote:I'm sure you've seen this before but just in case you haven't there is a vast collection of audio/video of Aragonese dialects in the Archivo audiovisual de l'Aragonés youtube channel.


I actually haven’t, that’s a brilliant resource, thanks! :D
Last edited by Saim on Thu Dec 24, 2020 8:19 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby galaxyrocker » Mon Dec 21, 2020 10:05 pm

Saim wrote: I think the problem the first time around was that I did way too many cards (like 10 or more...) per day so I would be "done" with it as soon as possible, but that just wasn't realistic or a particularly useful goal.


I've found this to be extremely true, at least with my study of Japanese Kanji. I'm doing the RRTK recommending by the Mass Immersion Approach, and they recommended quite a few a day (even at one point suggesting 30!). I settled on 10, but there are times where I feel like that is too much and reviews are catching up with me, even going and creating stories now. I've had a lot of cards get leached in the past few days, precisely because I feel the 10 a day was too much. Sadly, I'm almost finished with it now so will just keep the 10/day and see about solidifying them later when I actually learn it in terms of vocab as opposed to just recognizing them and their English translations.

But, overall, I wish it was more common to see this. Sadly, it appears that so many people rush through them, and that's what most advice points towards. I guess it also doesn't help I do my Anki reviews all at once instead of scattered throughout the day, so it becomes that much more taxing.
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Tue Dec 22, 2020 10:06 am

galaxyrocker wrote:But, overall, I wish it was more common to see this. Sadly, it appears that so many people rush through them, and that's what most advice points towards. I guess it also doesn't help I do my Anki reviews all at once instead of scattered throughout the day, so it becomes that much more taxing.


Totally, it's overkill. Maybe it's worth doing if you're immediately making studying Japanese/Chinese your full-time job, but that doesn't apply to 99% of beginners.

I personally don't get the logic behind running through recognition Heisig at the beginning of the learning process... recognition is not so hard to achieve basically through input + memorisation at the level of words and sentences, so what does putting so much effort into isolated character study bring to the table? Surely the benefit from actually studying mostly comes from learning stroke orders, so you can write by hand, understand handwriting and look up characters from sources where you can't copy and paste.

I feel like MIA or Refold or whatever went from a very hard approach that gives you certain advantages if you actually go through it (recall Heisig from the beginning), to a somewhat easier (but still hard) approach that doesn't really give you as much "return on investment" relative to the amount of energy you have to put in (recognition Heisig from the beginning).

But hey, I'm just an advanced beginner in Mandarin, so maybe I'm totally off-base here. :)
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby galaxyrocker » Tue Dec 22, 2020 8:33 pm

Saim wrote:I feel like MIA or Refold or whatever went from a very hard approach that gives you certain advantages if you actually go through it (recall Heisig from the beginning), to a somewhat easier (but still hard) approach that doesn't really give you as much "return on investment" relative to the amount of energy you have to put in (recognition Heisig from the beginning).


I definitely agree with this. I think MIA would've been much better if it just started you with N5 kanji, doing both recall/recognition from the beginning (though I understand why they don't suggest recall), which is basically what you mentioned with learning kanji in word/sentence-context. I think I understand why they did it, but I don't necessarily agree with it having come this far. I think starting with N5 kanji and graded readers would've been much more useful. If for some reason I slack off on this and ever decide to restart Japanese, that's likely what I would do. Make a deck of the N5 kanji, try to find a graded reader for that level, and then work through those along with Anki. Especially as I still have yet to actually consume any Japanese content since I only ever see recommendations for anime (and am just much more interested in reading than I am in listening in general, though that'll likely change if I decide to go teach over there)
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Thu Dec 24, 2020 8:29 am

Hungarian

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A Vörös Eszti és más elbeszélések - Csáth Géza, 222 pages

A collection of stories by Géza Csáth. I was surprised when I realised it was all written in the early 1900s, because I found it a relatively straightforward read. Maybe they updated it somewhat for this edition, published in 2020.

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Fiction

Rumini - Berg Judit, 216 pages
Johanna és a Dräher utcai gyilkosság - C. C. Kicker, 220 pages
A vörös eszti és más elbeszélések - Csáth Géza, 222 pages

Total fiction: 658 pages

Non-fiction

Így tanulok nyelveket, Lomb Kató - 160 pages
Államok, nyelvek, államnyelvek - Csernicskó István, 530 pages

Total non-fiction: 690 pages

Total all books: 1348 pages
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Saim
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Re: Neoplanta log - Serbian, Hungarian, Mandarin, etc.

Postby Saim » Sat Feb 06, 2021 1:09 am

I haven't updated for a while because I spent half of January/the end of December "repatriating" from Serbia to Australia and then sitting in quarantine. Since I've been back in Brisbane I've been prioritising spending time with my parents, sister and friends from school, going to events to meet new people, and looking for work, so I haven't had so much time for languages.

I've reduced my "main focus" decks in Anki to 3 new cards per day. 5 is insanity, especially since I'd like to (bit haven't managed to...) slip Urdu in there at some point.

Portuguese

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One of the things I have managed to do since I've been in Brisbane is finishing off the show Coisa mais linda. Sometimes the political themes are a bit hamfisted and overdone, but I still enjoyed it a lot. I got to the point where in the second season I was already at the point where there were very few new words. For the first couple of episodes I watched it on my computer and made audio cards for each sentence with a new word, but later I couldn't do that and just noted down words from the subtitles while watching and then went over them in a different session.

I can't wait to watch another show in Portuguese and see how much new vocabulary there is. I might also get a local Brazilian tutor at some point (my comprehension is pretty good already, I think there's no sense in delaying interaction much longer), although I think I'll wait to get full-time employment so it's more obvious how to fit it into my schedule.

While I was in quarantine I also read two Portuguese books, both fairly short and simple. One was an old detective novel I read while also listening to the audiobook, and the other one was Veronika decide morrer by Paulo Coelho. Funnily enough, Veronika decide morrer is the first book I ever read in a foreign language, but I read it in the Spanish translation (about a decade ago :lol: ). I had the sneaking suspicion that it kind of relativises the concept of mental illness in a fairly pseudoscientific way, but I guess I don't have enough expertise to really comment.

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Veronika decide morrer - Paulo Coelho, 210 pages
Um cadáver ouve rádio - Marcos Rey, 126 pages; 3 hours

Total fiction: 236 pages
Audiobooks: 3 hours


Polish

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Maja - Jostein Gaarder, 340 pages

A funny coincidence: about a week after I'd finished reading the Serbian copy of Dukkeføreren, a Polish friend lent me this book. It's definitely a book that gives you a lot to think about: it's not every day you read philosophical themes explored through a character imagining himself talking to a gecko. I'll have to admit I found the "connection" between the Sanskrit maya (delusion) and the Spanish maja (f. nice, pretty) kind of jarring and forced due to the difference in pronunciation; presumably the Norwegian transcription of maya has the same spelling as Spanish maja, as happens in the Polish translation (I wonder what they do in the English translation?).

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Biegnij, chłopcze, biegnij - Uri Orlev, 230 pages (translated from Hebrew)
Maja - Jostein Gaarder, 340 pages (translated from Norwegian)



Serbian

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Imaginarni Albanac - Aleksandar Pavlović, 128 pages

A fascinating look at how the discourse and themes of Serbo-Albanian enmity were historically constructed around concrete land disputes, and how Albanians were often perceived positively by Serbian authors in the 17th and 18th Centuries (IIRC, I may be slightly off on the timeline). The book also draws on progressive Serbian authors who criticised Serbia's 1912-1913 invasion of Albania (and Kosovo and parts of Macedonia IIRC, of course at the time the modern borders had not yet been established), such as Tucović (whose "Srbija i Albanija" I read quite a while ago). The book is available for free in pdf format here.

I also listened to a radio interview of the author. I find this is quite good for language learning as non-fiction authors generally speak about their books in a way that is quite similar to their writing style, so you're getting repetition in a different format. One thing that surprised me was that Pavlović claims that Todorova, whose "Imagining the Balkans" was the main inspiration for this work, based her own work on that of Edward Said (Orientalism), while I remember Todorova herself (I read Imagining the Balkans in the Serbian translation a year or so ago) claiming to reject Said's more postmodern analytical framework. I haven't read Orientalism myself so I'm not sure where the difference lies.

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Fiction

Ana Marija me nije volela - Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović, 184 pages
Javna ptica - Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović, 303 pages
Uho, nož, grlo - Vedrana Rudan, 172 pages
Mundo libre - Marko Krstić, 232 pages
Ostrvo - Meša Selimović, 198 pages
Sjećanja - Meša Selimović, 256 pages
Američki derviš - Ayad Akhtar, 354 pages (translated from English)
Glad - Mirjana Bobić Mojsilović, 224 pages
Derviš i smrt - Meša Selimović, 369 pages
Ono sve što znaš o meni - Mirjana Bobić Mojsilović, 235 pages
Tvrđava - Meša Selimović, 373 pages
Niko i ništa u Parizu i Londonu - George Orwell, 180 pages (translated from English)
Neoplanta ili Obećena zemlja - Végel László, 257 pages (translated from Hungarian)
Dvojnici iz tame - Morea Banićević, 282 pages
Elitna prostitutka - Jasmina Ana, 192 pages
Lutkar - Jostein Gaarder, 235 pages (translated from Norwegian)
Bljuzga u podne - Predrag Ličina, 243 pages
Roman o Londonu (Prva Knjiga) - Miloš Crnjanski, 388 pages
Paunovo pero - Ljiljana Habjanović Đurović, 497 pages

Non-fiction

Nova lica jezika, Ranko Bugarski, 250 pages
Mađarska revolucija 1956 - Ivan Ivanji, 325 pages
O psovanju - Predrag Krstić, 125 pages
Imaginarni Albanac - Aleksandar Pavlović, 128 pages

Total fiction: 5174
Total books: 6002


Memrise

I did a major cull of all my Memrise decks a couple of weeks ago. I fell behind while I was traveling, but I think my decks also became a bit bloated and there's not much sense in revising the same cards again and again. I've made a spreadsheet where I note down how many words each deck had, so I still feel like I'm progressing as I prune my collection. I think maybe I'll delete decks once I get to around ~100 cards in them.

I've decided to do new cards on the browser version of the site, and do revision in the mobile app. I find having to type out the words helps a lot, but is generally overkill for revision.
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