If you give an עכבר a كعكة

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Deinonysus
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Aug 30, 2021 2:41 pm

Ezra wrote:
Deinonysus wrote:The key cluster and trackball clusters for my Ultimate Hacking Keyboard finally came! I pre-ordered them close to a year ago and they had a lot of delays, but I'm glad it finally came. With the key cluster I can easily press "enter" with my thumb instead of my pinky, so Duolingo doesn't hurt my hand anymore!

It looks gorgeous with this pads! Though it does seem to cost a small fortune as well :D.
Yes, it is certainly one of the more expensive prebuilt keyboards out there (although there's practically no upper limit for custom keyboards)! But I did have some very specific requirements and this was one of the only keyboards that fit the bill. The other was the Dygma Raise which is comparable in price but the UHK ended up being much more expensive because I bought all the accessories!

My main requirement was that it have a short spacebar with two extra keys comfortably reachable by thumb. My custom multilingual layout requires heavy use of the right alt (alt-gr) key, and for a diacritic-heavy language like French, I was hitting alt-gr many times per sentence. But on a standard keyboard, the right alt button requires a very uncomfortable thumb stretch and repeated use was making my thumb hurt, so I wanted to make sure that I had extra keys that I could map as alt-gr.

Some other ideal features that appealed to me were:
  • Available in ISO format, which has an extra key and allows "angle mod", pushing all keys on the bottom left row one column to the left. This means that the fingers on the left hand curl inward, which is a bit more natural than typing on a standard keyboard.
  • Able to be split and tented for better ergonomics
  • The UHK won me over with the modules, I thought they were really cool, although it ended up taking much longer than expected for them to arrive.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Sep 12, 2021 5:13 pm

It's been a while since I've updated! Things are going about the same as usual. Making good progress with Duolingo and Pimsleur but struggling to keep up with Assimil because its time slot is right before bed and I get tired.

: 149 / 230 Duolingo Arabic
: 23 / 77 Assimil L'arabe
: 22 / 90 Pimsleur Modern Standard Arabic

I've had some temptation to dabble in other languages:
  • Turkish because it's cool language and I'd like to practice typing it to test out my keyboard layout
  • Italian because I've gotten back into opera singing, although I had to take a break because of a sore throat. I think I finally figured out how to sing a high A; I was singing along with Franco Corelli's recording of "E lucevan le stelle" and I was able to sing the high A very comfortably. I felt something open up in the back of my throat and it felt a bit like where I pronounce the letter ح (ḥāʾ) in Arabic. I've read about how you're supposed to tilt your larynx to hit the higher tenor notes, so maybe that's the same thing as pharyngeal constriction (which is what happens when you pronounce the letter ح), or it's at least connected. Unfortunately I haven't been able to replicate this due to the aforementioned sore throat.
But I decided against studying them because I don't want to derail my Arabic progress.

Incidentally, I wonder if I'll have an easy time reading Ottoman Turkish once my level of Arabic is higher. Unlike modern Turkish where almost all of the vocabulary is Turkic, Ottoman Turkish had a massive amount of Perso-Arabic vocabulary.

Polyglot Fitness Challenge

Still going strong with the running. About a month ago 2 miles would have been a long run for me; now it's a short run!

I've been running pretty much the same way since I picked up running as a sporadic hobby ten or so years ago. But I recently discovered a major flaw in my running style which is that I don't take advantage of the elastic nature of human legs, which basically makes them spring-loaded if you use them right. I've been doing some reading on Reddit's r/barefootrunning community and came across these two videos that made me rethink how I've been running.



Before, my style was to step down with as little force as possible and exclusively use my muscles to launch myself forward. But I was inspired to try a new style, where I push down and back with more force to load my tendons, and let them spring forward to get some of my spent energy back. It did seem to work pretty well, and even though my steps were using more force they felt lighter and I didn't need to slow down nearly as much when I hit gravelly patches or rough pavement. Unfortunately I went a little too HAM on the initial uphill portion of my run, and I had to slow down significantly about a mile in, and I eventually had to cut my run short and head back after two miles. I was out for 27 minutes and the whole circuit was 2.5 miles, so that puts me at a 10:48 mile pace, or 33:29 for a 5k. This is around the same pace as my last 5k-ish run where I was out for around 35 minutes.

Next run I'll try to start out with a more reasonable pace and finish my updated route, which is around 3.4 miles (5.5 km). I'm strongly considering running a local 5k race in a month, and if I'm used to running slightly over 5k then I'll be much less likely to run out of steam by the end of the 5k race. My ankle was feeling a bit weird the past couple of days but it's feeling much better today, so hopefully I won't have to skip my next run on Tuesday.

Reading

I finished Born to Run and Cuneiform. I started picking The War of the Worlds at around the half-way point, which is where I left off.
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Deinonysus
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Sat Sep 25, 2021 7:08 pm

Well, as it turned out, I tried to apply the principles from those running videos but I pushed down with way too much force and got hurt. I sprained a ligament in my knee on one leg and my ankle on the other leg. I haven't run since my last post and I'm starting to feel much better. I think I'll start introducing some light runs soon and maybe I'll be up for a local 5k race in a couple of weeks. When I do get back to running, I'll definitely go back to my original style that has served me well. Maybe I'll just focus on being a bit bouncier and not be so concerned about hitting the ground with as little force as possible.

Arabic is going okay. My progress has been about the same as usual in Duolingo and I'm almost done with unit 1 of Pimsleur MSA. I don't think it'll be too long before my MSA overtakes my level of Hebrew. I am floundering a bit with Assimil, though. I've been catching up on movies and TV and I'm too tired to do my Assimil lesson before bed. Maybe I'll be able to do one tonight. Another obstacle is that a remake of one of my favorite games of all time (Diablo II) just came out. I'm playing it in French so that I can at least say it kind of counts as study time.

I ran into a couple of interesting words in Duolingo. One is طبيعة (ṭabīʿa), meaning "nature". It will be familiar to chess players as the loanword "tabiya", meaning a single position that comes up commonly and has a lot of different branching responses. Another interesting word was عالم (ʿālam). I thought it sounded similar to the Hebrew word עולם (olám) (also meaning "world") so I looked it up, and sure enough, it was a loanword from Hebrew or Aramaic and possibly originally from Akkadian.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Sep 27, 2021 3:02 pm

I have a small victory to report. I've completed an Assimil lesson two nights in a row, and I have reviewed every lesson I've previously done, so tonight will be my first brand new lesson since restarting Arabic a month and a half ago. If I am able to keep doing a lesson every night, I should be able to finish L'arabe in November and Perfectionnement arabe by the end of January. More realistically, sleep is more important than my unofficial Assimil streak so I'd be happy to finish the first book by the end of the year.

: 161 / 230 Duolingo Arabic
: 23 / 77 Assimil L'arabe
: 23 / 90 Pimsleur Modern Standard Arabic

I've built up a collection of amusing screenshots from Duolingo Arabic. Most of them involve cats, translating الحمد لله as "praise be to God", or both. While it does literally mean that, my understanding is that it's much more common and less strong than in English, so a more idiomatic translation might be "thankfully" or "luckily". Here are a few examples:

Screenshot_20210821-134511_Chrome.jpg

Screenshot_20210906-084342_Chrome.jpg
Screenshot_20210922-062733_Chrome.jpg
Screenshot_20210927-063706_Chrome.jpg


And here is my personal favorite:
8dzua8m785k71.png
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby cjareck » Mon Sep 27, 2021 3:26 pm

Those screenshots are indeed quite funny, but thanks to them I am sure that dropping Duolingo was a wise decision ;)
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Sep 30, 2021 10:59 am

I remembered an interesting Arabic phrase that I learned from Duolingo: رب بيت (rabb bayt, meaning "homemaker" or literally "house master"). The word رب is a clear cognate to the word "rabbi", which is an inflected form of the word רב (rav) and means "my master". However, the Hebrew phrase for homemaker is בעל הבית (baʿal habbáyiṯ), meaning "lord of the house". I first became acquainted with the phrase a couple of years ago when my wife was heavily pregnant and my mother was visiting. I was a stressed-out whirlwind of motion trying to make dinner and also pick up and finish some chores since my wife was unable to help, so my mother admiringly called me a "balabusta", which is a Yiddish feminized version of the masculine Hebrew בעל הבית. Ashkenazi Hebrew is one of the few pronunciations that preserves the distinction between a hard ת (pronounced /t/) and a soft ת (originally pronounced /θ/, but converted to /s/ in Ashkenazi Hebrew); this is how we get the Ashkenazi "shabbos" and "bris" from "sabbath" (that one's filtered through Greek which has no "sh" sound) and "brith". The soft versions of /b/, /g/, /d/, /k/, /p/, and /t/ (called the בגד כפת "beged kefet" consonants) were aquired during the Babylonian captivity (shortly before the Hebrew language died out) because it was a feature of Babylonian Aramaic. The rules are somewhat similar to how Spanish's soft /b/, /d/, and /g/ work; a beged-kefet consonant becomes a fricative if comes after a vowel, unless it is doubled. Modern Hebrew preserves the soft versions of /b/, /k/, and /p/; since doubled consonants are lost in Modern Hebrew, the hard-soft distinction has become phonemic.

Anyway, you may recognize the word בעל (baʿál), especially if you've played Diablo 2. It literally means "lord", and the inflected forms mean someone's husband in Modern Hebrew. It is also featured in the name of the Carthaginian general Ḥannibaʿl (the elephant guy), whose name means "the Lord's grace". It features in the names of several Levantine deities, including one who has been portrayed as a devil-like figure in the Abrahamic religions.

Speaking of Diablo 2, I'm still playing it a lot in French, and I'm already collecting a weirdly exhaustive set of vocabulary for medieval weapons and armor. Interestingly, the French word for morningstar (a spiked mace) is left untranslated from German as "morgenstern".

Arabic is now officially my second most studied language on Duolingo, after having passed German. I'm still struggling to complete Assimil lessons. I've been swamped with work and taking care of the kid. A major limiting factor for language learning is what I like to call F-points. You get a limited number to spend within any given timeframe, and well, lately by the time I get through the day I'm all out of F's. But things should be lightening up soon so hopefully I should be able to get back to Assimil.
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Oct 07, 2021 9:15 pm

I very excitedly posted a new Hindi log the other day, but then I decided that I'm so close to some big milestones in my Arabic courses that it's better for me to wait the week or two that it will take me to finish Pimsleur Unit 1 (of 3), and if I keep up my current rate of a couple hundred XP a day on Duolingo I should be able to finish the Arabic course in that timeframe. That way I won't be getting distracted and losing time on Arabic, I'll be rewarding myself for my progress! Once I get there I think I'll be comfortable adding Arabic to my list of beginner-level languages, because I'll be able to introduce myself, ask for directions, and order food. Come to think of it, maybe I should remove Indonesian and possibly Icelandic as well from my list of "beginner" languages, they've gotten pretty rusty.

I am working on getting the 6 skills I've started in Duolingo Hindi up to level 5 so the spaced repetition cracking function will kick in. I've also been watching the Great Courses series A History of India. I've completed 7 of the 36 episodes and I'm finding it very interesting. Unfortunately there is no single series on the Middle East and North Africa, but there are a number of specialized courses that should cover a lot of it:
  • Ancient Mesopotamia: Life in the Cradle of Civilization - I've watched about half of this and it's terrific! Covers everything up to the fall of the Neo-Babylonian Empire at the hands of Cyrus the Great.
  • The History of Ancient Egypt - Covers everything from prehistory to Cleopatra.
  • The Holy Land revealed - Goes over the history of the Levant [correction: just Israel/Palestine], focusing mainly on Judaism and Christianity, with a final episode on Islam. I'm assuming that other ancient religions of the Levant will also be mentioned in the first episode.
  • Turning Points in Middle Eastern History - Starts with the dawn of Islam and covers up to the end of the Ottoman Empire.
  • Islamic Golden Age - This is one of the periods of history I'm most interested in but I don't know much about it. I watched the first couple of episodes but then I decided I'd might as well start at the beginning so I started the one on ancient Mesopotamia.
  • The Ottoman Empire - There's like a 70% chance I get distracted from whatever language I'm learning at the time and switch to Turkish when I start watching this one.
Maybe it's a benefit and not a drawback that there are so many different courses needed to cover this subject, because they will go into much more detail on the individual subjects than one big course could. There are also series on the Persian and Byzantine empires, but sadly they are not included for free with the Kanopy streaming service so I probably won't watch them because they're really expensive.

I learned about كبة (kibbeh), a Levantine dish consisting of fried bulgar paste stuffed with beef. Sadly there doesn't seem to be a restaurant in my area that has it and it seems too involved for us to make ourselves. Next time we travel we'll have to be on the lookout for a middle eastern restaurant that serves it! I was going to watch a video about them in English, but then I figured, why not try it in Arabic? I watched a recipe video in Arabic and it was in MSA, not a dialect. I recognized some words but no full sentences. I did recogniz the word for meat, لحم (laḥm), a clear cognate to the Hebrew word לחם (lɛ́ḥɛm), meaning "bread." I guess some signals got mixed up somewhere!
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Oct 08, 2021 10:57 am

Here are a couple of interesting things that I have noticed:

You often tell whether a word is a postclassical borrowing between Hebrew and Arabic rather than a shared Semitic word. For instance, the name Sarah is سارة (sāra). However, in Hebrew it's שרה (śɔrɔ́), so if the Arabic name were from Proto-Semitic it would be شادة (šāra, or "Shara"), which is how the Proto-Semitic consonant *ś is pronounced in Arabic. Another example is that the Arabic word حمص (ḥummuṣ) was borrowed into Modern Hebrew as חומוס (khúmus). But if it were a native Hebrew word, the Proto-Semitic consonant *ṣ would be pronounced "ts" in Modern Hebrew. Well in fact, it is a native Hebrew word, but with a very different meaning. חמץ (ḥāméṣ, or in Modern Hebrew pronunciation khaméts) is a verb meaning to ferment or leaven. As a noun it is familiar to Jews around the world as leavened products that observant Jews must remove from the house before Passover begins; bread crumbs are traditionally swept off of the floor with a feather.

There are some weird differences in formality between Pimsleur and Duolingo. Pimsleur teaches a fairly conversational but solidly non-dialectical MSA. Duolingo's particular ideolect mixes MSA and dialectal forms and words (for example, they use a dialectical Persian borrowing for soup, شوربة (šūrba), rather than the MSA word حساء (ḥasāʾ); what gave it away was that the text-to-speech audio was not able to pronounce the dialectical word because it's designed for MSA; it came out as "shawurby"). Also, Duolingo enforces a couple of very formal MSA rules that all yes-or-no questions must begin with هل (hal), and that indefinite accusative nouns must take the special accusative form, which ends in an "-an" sound that is often marked in writing with an alif. Pimsleur, which is otherwise more formal than Duolingo, dispenses with these rules.

One slight annoyance is that the letter ض (ḍ) is merged with ظ (ẓ) in many dialects, and speakers of these dialects seem to have trouble distinguishing these two letters even in formal MSA, so as a result, every time I hear the ẓ sound in Pimsleur (which is a velarized voiced "th" sound), I need to look it up to see whether it's really ظ or if it's just a softened ض. Avoiding spelling confusion was half the point of my learning MSA!
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Oct 14, 2021 10:53 am

I've been going back and forth about what language to work on. First I wanted to dabble in Hindi. I did meet my goal to some extent, learning the script and a tiny bit of basic grammar and vocabulary. Then, I thought about trying to get my German to the next level and also try to get my Italian up to a usable level. This was partly out of an increased interest in Western Classical Music, but also out of frustration with my struggles with the Arabic Assimil course. But if I drop the Arabic Assimil course, I'll have to review it again when I pick it up again, which I don't want to do. So I have ultimately decided to keep working on Arabic, and switch up how my time slots work.

  • Morning time slot: Once I'm done with the Duolingo Arabic course, review the cracked lessons every morning; if there are no cracked lessons, review Duolingo French to maintain my streak. Then work on Anki for Ahlan wa Sahlan.
  • Commute time slot: Keep working on Pimsleur Modern Standard Arabic. Once I finish the remaining two units of MSA, I have some decisions to make. I can go through their Levantine Arabic course but this risks confusion between MSA and dialect. It might be better to see if I can work in DLI Basic Arabic. If that doesn't work out maybe I could work on the Spanish or Italian Pimsleur courses.
  • Before lunch time slot: Assimil. I was originally going to do this after lunch, but I get sleepy after lunch and I have a tendency to fall asleep doing Assimil in my comfy chair. So I will study before lunch, and at a table, not a recliner!
  • Evening time slot: Go through Mastering the Arabic Script, then Ahlan wa Sahlan once I am comfortable writing in ruqʿa, which is how adults write. Again, I should do this at the table, not in the recliner!

: 172 / 230 Duolingo Arabic
: 24 / 77 Assimil L'arabe
: 28 / 90 Pimsleur Modern Standard Arabic
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Re: If you give an עכבר a كعكة

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Oct 18, 2021 1:39 pm

I just realized that I started this log just over a year ago! But I wasn't studying Arabic for a solid year. I studied for about 2.5 months from October-December of last year, and another 3.5 months from July-now this year, for a total of 6 months. My best results were in Duolingo, having nearly completed the course. Assimil is a bit sad, having completed less than a month of lessons in my six months of active study. Pimsleur is a bit better; I have completed the first of three levels, and a level usually takes me six weeks to complete. I didn't start it right away because I was working on finishing the FSI Levantine Arabic Phonology course, which also covered sounds that are only found in MSA, not Levantine Arabic.

I am a bit frustrated that my level of comprehension is remaining low, but I don't have a point of comparison. The only other languages I have spent at least this much time on have been Western European languages where I get a lot of free vocabulary; the only vocabulary I get for Arabic is from my beginner-level Hebrew. But I do find myself understanding whole sentences more and more in children's books, newspaper headlines, and Reddit posts. Spending a few days on Hindi was a great reminder of the difference between the absolute beginner level and a mid- to advanced beginner level. When I look at a Hindi sentence I struggle to identify each individual letter and generally can't identify any words beyond maybe "to be". But with Arabic, I can identify known words at a glance and sound out unknown words pretty quickly (making my best guess on the short vowels), and I can pick out the sentence structure pretty well so I will generally know the part of speech of an unknown word. I am also able to occasionally figure things out from context. For example, I was skimming through my children's books last night and I saw the phrase في يَوْمِ مِنَ الأَيّامِ (fī yaumin mina l-ʾayyāmi, literally "on a day of the days") a few times and determined that it must mean something like "one day" or "once upon a time".

I haven't settled into the new time slot arrangement yet, and I don't know if I'll be able to get into it this week because my daughter is home from daycare with a mild cough. But I have been reasonably good at making progress with Assimil and I've been completing a lesson at night more often than not. I haven't been sleeping the best because I've gotten into Starcraft, which I used to play many years ago shortly after it came out. I'm most of the way through the original campaigns, but I still have the Brood War campaigns and all of Starcraft II to get through, so that may limit my Arabic progress for a while. I'm also still playing a lot of Diablo 2 Resurrected in French and I have noticed my listening comprehension getting better. I try to look away from the dialog boxes and only go back and read when I can't parse the spoken audio.

My interest in Starcraft makes it tempting to study Korean (since South Korea has historically had the most elite Starcraft scene), especially now that Squid Game is very popular, and of course there is a ton of other great Korean media to enjoy. But judging by my Arabic progress, it would take me at least a year to start getting much enjoyment out of the native media, and I'm not willing to dedicate that kind of time to Korean at the moment. I'll plan on tackling the Sinosphere languages in the later 2020s after I've hopefully reached my desired level in Arabic, Hebrew, German, and the major Romance languages. The first one (Japanese) will be tough, but the rest will be easier once I have a base of Sinosphere vocabulary.

: 174 / 230 Duolingo Arabic
: 25 / 77 Assimil L'arabe
: 30 / 90 Pimsleur Modern Standard Arabic
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