Learning by reading

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Le Baron
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby Le Baron » Sun Mar 14, 2021 7:18 pm

Nogon wrote:Afrikaans:
Harry Potter en die towenaar se steen. "The magician his stone" :lol: - isn't that cute?

Out of interest, in (not so old) Dutch the same construction exists. I remember when my ex-wife saved my father's telephone number to her phone under (let us say my name is Harry): 'Harry z'n vader'. Whereas more and more people would now put: Harrys vader/vader van...
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Mista
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby Mista » Sun Mar 14, 2021 9:35 pm

Le Baron wrote:
Nogon wrote:Afrikaans:
Harry Potter en die towenaar se steen. "The magician his stone" :lol: - isn't that cute?

Out of interest, in (not so old) Dutch the same construction exists. I remember when my ex-wife saved my father's telephone number to her phone under (let us say my name is Harry): 'Harry z'n vader'. Whereas more and more people would now put: Harrys vader/vader van...

We have it in Norwegian too, although it is traditionally used more in oral than in written language. The phenomenon is known as "garpegenitiv", and it seems to have made its way into Norwegian from Low German without taking the traditional route through Denmark. Here's a wikipedia article about it: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garpegenitiv
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Nogon
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby Nogon » Sun Mar 14, 2021 10:09 pm

Garpegenitiv - never heard that word. The phenomenon itself exists in German too, at least in some areas in spoken language, but it is not considered to be "good" German.
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jeff_lindqvist
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun Mar 14, 2021 10:59 pm

Mista wrote:We have it in Norwegian too, although it is traditionally used more in oral than in written language. The phenomenon is known as "garpegenitiv", and it seems to have made its way into Norwegian from Low German without taking the traditional route through Denmark. Here's a wikipedia article about it: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garpegenitiv


I came to think of it when I saw the Afrikaans/Dutch examples. I had read about the construction on HTLAL and also heard it in Ylvis songs. Then I heard it IRL. :o
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Nogon
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby Nogon » Sun Mar 21, 2021 8:36 pm

Week 11:
Hmm...

French:
Finished listening/reading Romain Gary (Émile Ajar) - La vie devant soi. I'll read that book again in a few years, when my French (hopefully) will be better.
Continued reading Christelle Dabos - Les fiancés de l'hiver. It felt like I only read a few pages each day, nevertheless I'm now on page 286, that is halfways through the book.
Started listening/reading Delphine de Vigan - D'après une histoire vraie, read by Marianne Épin. Only read the first chapter, so I can't say anything about the book yet, except that it is an unabridgded reading and I like Marianne Épin's voice.

Dutch:
Finished listening/reading Annie M. G. Schmidt - Minoes. A cute children's book with some surprisingly deep thoughts.

Yiddish & Afrikaans:
Continued reading Harry Potter I. I've only read a few pages, as it's quite boring.

Polish:
I had planned to start Assimil Polnisch ohne Mühe again, but lacked the necessary energy. Instead I visited the library and borrowed Olga Tokarczuk - Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead) both as audiobook (read by Agata Kulesza) and in print. Now I'm listening to the audio twice while first reading it in Polish and then the Swedish translation. I'm happy about each word that I recognize - unfortunately they aren't that many, but enough to follow along while reading the translation. It helps that I've already read the book once, about 10 years ago, when it was issued in Sweden.
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Nogon
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby Nogon » Sun Mar 28, 2021 4:30 pm

Week 12:
Another hard week at work, without much time and energy left for languages :roll: .

French:
Continued reading Christelle Dabos - Les fiancés de l'hiver. I'm on page 360 now - still 200 pages left. It's not a bad book and the language is at an appropriate level for me, it's just too long. I prefer shorter books (although some of my favourite books ever are Dream of the Red Chamber, Péter Nádas' Parallel Stories and Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob - all of them rather longish novels ;) ).

Polish:
Continued listening/reading Olga Tokarczuk - Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych. I absolutely love the audiobook! Agata Kulesza has a wonderful voice and reads beautifully, even though I don't understand anything, except for a word or phrase here and there. I also like the book itself very much, surprisingly, as it was my least favourite of Tokarczuk's books when I first read it. Most surprisingly, I think I'm falling in love with the sound of the Polish language! Up to now Polish ranged quite low on my list of "beautifully sounding" languages but that is about to change now. The "r" (whish I could produce that), the double "nn", even all those different "sch"-sounds... I think I might succeed learning Polish this time! :D

Other:
Gaston Dorren - Lingo. En språkresa genom Europa (in Swedish)
Dave Goulson - Den vilda trädgården. Det rika livet i en lagom tuktad täppa (in Swedish)
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Nogon
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby Nogon » Sun Apr 04, 2021 5:07 pm

Week 13:
Too much work :( . Why on earth did I accept to work this weekend? Stupid me!

French:
Finished reading Christelle Dabos - Les fiancés de l'hiver, part 1 of a tetralogy. Don't think that I'll read the other parts, as it was an okay young adult fantasy book but not that captivating that I absolutely have to know what will happen on the next 1500 or so pages. It was nice though to see my progress in understanding and reading speed throughout the book's 566 pages.
Not sure what to read next.

Polish:
Finished listening/reading Olga Tokarczuk - Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych. I think I'll listen/read it again next week as I liked the book very much. (I also saw that the library owns the French translation of that book; maybe that will be my next book in French.) I might restart the Polish Assimil next week. Or I might not :? . We'll see.

Danish:
Watched several episodes of Den klassiske musikquiz. Such a strange language! Why do the Danes pronounce the "bag" part in "bagfra" and "baglæns" differently even though the meaning is the same? (I guess the answer is just "Because they do".)

Yiddish:
Read העדי פֿריד/סטינאַ װירסען - אַ מעשׂה װעגן באָדרי, an illustrated children's book translated from Swedish.
No Harry Potter.

Other:
Finished reading Dave Goulson - Den vilda trädgården. Det rika livet i en lagom tuktad täppa (in Swedish)
Started reading Caitlin Doughty - From Here to Eternity. Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (in English)
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Nogon
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby Nogon » Mon Apr 12, 2021 9:16 am

Week 14:
Work, work, work... :(

French:
First week for at least two months, that I didn't read any French. With the exception, that is, of a few pages at the beginnings of several books, but none of them seemed to be the "right" one just now. There are times, when every book is the wrong one... :(

Ume Sami:
I read an illustrated bilingual book, Elin Marakatt/Anita Midbjer - Lilli, áhtjájjá jah guaksagh/Lilli, farfar och norrskenet. I actually thought that it was in Northern Sami, but I borrowed the wrong copy at the library :roll: .

Yiddish:
Read A. A. Milne - Vini-der-Pu. Delightful book, unfortunately it was printed in Latin transcription, except a few lines at the beginning of each chapter.
Started reading a bilingual book יעל סטראָם/עמיל זינגער-פֿוער - שלמהל-בױמל מיטן מזלדיקן דרײדל / Yale Strom/Emil Singer-Fuer - Shloyml Boyml and His Lucky Dreydl (click). When reading Yiddish, I very much depend on finding similarly sounding German words. Often that is successfull, but sometimes less so... The זילבערנע פֿאַנע (zilberne fane) turned out not to be a "silberne Fahne" (silver flag), but a "silberne Pfanne" - a silver pan. Slight difference. :D

Other:
Finished reading Caitlin Doughty - From Here to Eternity. Traveling the World to Find the Good Death (in English) and Gaston Dorren - Lingo. En språkresa genom Europa (in Swedish).
Read Katarina Taikon - Katitzi Z-1234 (in Swedish).
Started reading Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o - The Perfect Nine (in English) and Judith Schlansky - Verzeichnis einiger Verluste (in German). Both from this year's International Booker Prize longlist. Ngũgĩ's book I got from the library, Schalansky's I happened to have in my book shelves.

International Booker Prize:
The International Booker is awarded to a book translated into English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland the preceding year. Two weeks ago, this year's longlist was announced. This year I somewhat proudly realised that I might be able to read almost half of the books (6 out of 13) in the original language. Then however I began to wonder about the range of languages the books were translated from: four books from Romance languages (2 each from Spanish and French), another four from Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Danish and Swedish). The remaining five - representing all the other languages - come from Chinese, Georgian, Gikuyu, Arabic and Russian. A bit eurocentric, unfortunately.
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Iversen
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby Iversen » Tue Apr 13, 2021 7:04 am

Nogon wrote:Danish:
Watched several episodes of Den klassiske musikquiz. Such a strange language! Why do the Danes pronounce the "bag" part in "bagfra" and "baglæns" differently even though the meaning is the same? (I guess the answer is just "Because they do".)


I have not looked it up, but it strikes me that there is a noun "bag" (definite "bagen"), and "fra" is a preposition; this means that "bagfra" covers a prepositional syntagme "fra bag(en)". In contrast "-læns" isn't a preposition, but an adjective (if you are broke you are 'læns' of money, and a boat should be 'læns' of water inside), which means that "bag-" hear has an adverbial function. hahaha .. and then I looked the words up in Politiken's "Etymologisk ordbog" and found that I'm all wrong: "baglæns" in all likelihood comes from the noun "bag" (the behind of something) and an old preposition "længes" (roughly 'along'), which in its turn was derived from the genitive of a substantive "længe" (still used today about the wing of a farm building or manor house). So now my revised hypothesis is that us Danes have forgotten that the "-læns" also once was a preposition, whereas "fra" ('from') still is alive and kicking today - and that's why we treat "bagfra" og "baglæns" differently.

By the way, only "bag-" and "bag-" mean the same thing - "baglæns" and "bagfra" don't ('in reverse' vs. 'from behind').

Similarly "baggård" (inner courtyard in block house area) has an open 'a' as in "baglæns" because "-gård" is a noun, whereas "bagtil", "bagpå" and "bagud" have flat 'a's. Furthermore "bag-" in "bagstopper" is pronounced as in "baglæns" - a "bagstopper" is the person why stops balls that have passed behind the goal or a catcher in for instance 'rundbold' (a game that resembles baseball for three year olds, but was very popular when I went to school in the 60s). Here "-stopper" is a noun, although not one used often as a isolated word. Ditto for the nautical term "bagbord" - here "-bord" is a part of a ship or boat, but you NEVER see it in isolation when it keeps its nautical meaning, probably because there are so many "borde" ('tables') in the other sense around.
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Nogon
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Re: Learning by reading

Postby Nogon » Tue Apr 13, 2021 9:57 am

Thanks, Iversen!
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