Beosweyne learns more Zulu in 2023

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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby Beosweyne » Sun Aug 01, 2021 11:28 am

In the month gone by I worked on my languages for 83 hours in total. So, a little short of my target of 3 hours per day.

july-21.png


Classical Arabic

August will see my 5-month long Arabic drought coming to an end, as I'm going to enter the latest 6WC with Arabic. It'll be my first 6WC and so the novelty factor should help to motivate me. Your man to root for on the leaderboard is selfdidact.

The task I've set myself is to complete 10 lessons out of the 40 in Wheeler Thackston's Intro. to Koranic & Classical Arabic.

Back in February I had already completed a quarter of Munther Younes' Routledge Intro. to Qur'anic Arabic but, due mainly to the lack of challenging exercises, I felt I was not retaining past material well enough as I proceeded through the chapters. I got Thackston's book because it is packed with exercises and especially sentences to translate into Arabic.

Ancient Greek

Our reading group for John Taylor's Greek Beyond GCSE was on holiday for most of the month, but we did get to read a 5-sentence excerpt from Xenophon's Anabasis (in book 7 sec. 7.20-24) and, oh dear, translating it took me nearly all the 8 hours shown for Greek in the chart above! Up to that point most readings in Taylor's 3-volume series had come from Herodotus, but here Xenophon's writing style feels definitely a level above.

Translating short contextless passages is fine for an occasional exercise but I really ought to be spending the majority of my time on extensive reading, now that I've studied All The Attic Grammar (or at least that portion covered by Taylor). Earlier in the year I wrote here about my plan to read the Anabasis in extensive mode. I lacked the enthusiasm to carry it through then, and still do now unfortunately.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Aug 01, 2021 6:08 pm

Beosweyne wrote:Translating short contextless passages is fine for an occasional exercise but I really ought to be spending the majority of my time on extensive reading, now that I've studied All The Attic Grammar (or at least that portion covered by Taylor). Earlier in the year I wrote here about my plan to read the Anabasis in extensive mode. I lacked the enthusiasm to carry it through then, and still do now unfortunately.

Don't feel chained to Xenophon.
You could stick with Herodotus. Geoffrey Steadman has an annotated commentary and vocabulary for
Book 1 intended for intermediate learners.

Along the same lines as Steadman's approach, there is Longus' Daphnis and Chloe
Longus' Daphnis and Chloe

Outside the USA, some teachers start their students with the other Anabasis, Arrian's, which is about Alexander the Great.
Loeb has it in 2 volumes, of which this is the first Arrian's Anabasis.

The many works of Lucian provide another way to launch into Ancient Greek.

Other suggestions occur to me, but if your plan is to begin extensive reading, none of them would work. Though even the easiest Ancient Greek does not make for easy extensive reading at first.

Finally, may I say that after further reading you might find that Xenophon is rather a step below than a step above Herodotus. But that's my own personal opinion, and others might (vociferously) disagree.

Whatever you do, good luck.
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Beli Tsar
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby Beli Tsar » Sun Aug 01, 2021 6:44 pm

MorkTheFiddle wrote:
Beosweyne wrote:Translating short contextless passages is fine for an occasional exercise but I really ought to be spending the majority of my time on extensive reading, now that I've studied All The Attic Grammar (or at least that portion covered by Taylor). Earlier in the year I wrote here about my plan to read the Anabasis in extensive mode. I lacked the enthusiasm to carry it through then, and still do now unfortunately.

Don't feel chained to Xenophon.
You could stick with Herodotus. Geoffrey Steadman has an annotated commentary and vocabulary for
Book 1 intended for intermediate learners.

Lots of good advice from MorkTheFiddle here, all of which I enthusiastically second. Well done on getting to this stage and best of luck with the fun parts to come!
MorkTheFiddle wrote:Finally, may I say that after further reading you might find that Xenophon is rather a step below than a step above Herodotus. But that's my own personal opinion, and others might (vociferously) disagree.

I'd definitely echo this - it's interesting that Taylor has prepared you more for Herodotus; most would I think say Xenophon is easier. If you want a gentler introduction there is an out-of-print and freely available Easy Selections from Xenophon (though without footnoted vocabulary like a modern reader - it's all at the back) https://archive.org/details/easyselectionsad00xenoiala and Bedwere has provided really excellent audio for this: https://archive.org/details/Esafx. He's also recorded the real thing: https://librivox.org/anabasis-by-xenophon/.

If you really want to start with extensive reading, though, the usual advice with Ancient Greek is not to start with real texts at all, but to use the Italian edition of Athenaze and/or the 'text and vocabulary' volume of Reading Greek. Both help you get lots of easy text that's nicely graded. The second can be picked up cheaply second hand in older editions (which are fine); the second may be a bit harder to order. But both are excellent - Athenaze better graded, and Reading Greek more varied and interesting. I personally benefited substantially from both.

Then, there is the uncompleted - but free - Lingua Graeca per se Illustrata https://seumasjeltzz.github.io/LinguaeGraecaePerSeIllustrata/, which is well worth looking at.

For real Greek, the New Testament is far easier than anything else - especially John's gospels and letters, and Mark. You can find the whole thing online with parsing and mouseover dictionary here: https://www.gntreader.com/?b=EPH&c=1&v=1.

And then I'd second the recommendation of Steadman's readers, and also the similar projects from Faenum http://www.faenumpublishing.com/ - often a little harder, but fun texts. There's really no need to chain yourself to Xenophon if you don't like him - Herodotus, Plato, Lysias and Lucian are all used as first texts.
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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby Beosweyne » Sun Aug 01, 2021 7:59 pm

Wow thank you once again MorkTheFiddle and Beli Tsar for introducing me to such a wealth of things to read.

It certainly appears that Herodotus' extracts in Taylor's textbooks have been adapted for the sake of beginners. It was just the combination of long sentences plus unfamiliar vocabulary that led me to complain about the cited passage from the Anabasis. From what you say, Herodotus unadapted would be even more challenging on both counts. Now I feel a little more confident about finally plunging into the Anabasis!
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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby Beosweyne » Thu Sep 02, 2021 12:29 pm

august-21.png

Last month I studied languages for exactly 100 hours. As planned, I have been participating in the 6-week challenge with Arabic, but I hadn't expected it to dominate the rest of my languages to such an extent. The time I would usually devote to Afrikaans, French, isiZulu and even my undisputed favourite, Latin, was cut in half or worse. However I didn't dare to cut back on Greek and Hieroglyphics owing to study-group commitments. It just goes to show how reliant I am on extrinsic motivators like challenges and accountability groups.

Arabic

Image
I am happily working through the exercises in Thackston's book, and they certainly are as challenging as I had wished when I bought the book, having abandoned my previous textbook due to its simplistic exercises. However it comes with a couple of drawbacks: for one, the small Arabic font looks awfully fuzzy next to the crisp English text. This is actually not a huge defect because the author's stated pedagogic approach is to omit vowel signs entirely as well as other inessential orthographical signs, which has the welcome side-effect of minimising textual clutter and hence the potential for blurry print to cause confusion. The other issue is with errors in the answer key volume: thanks to my prior background I was able to identify a number of these, at least 5 so far I'd say. Someone once tried to compile the errata but their list lacks some of the errors I have spotted.

Latin & Ancient Greek

ImageImage
Last month I finished reading Orberg's abridgement of Caesar's Gallic war commentaries. Then I started reading Regulus, Auguste Haury's translation of Le petit prince (Saint-Exupéry). I last read it in 2015, and in fact it was my first Latin text after completing Assimil's Le latin sans peine. At that time I thought it would be a straightforward read because portions of it appeared in lessons 72 to 75 of Assimil. In the event it took me several months and countless dictionary lookups to get through, but to my credit I think I understood most of the first half—the encounter in the desert, the interstellar journey, the boy's relationship with the flower—but following the fox's introduction very little made sense. To date it remains the only version of the Little Prince that I've read, so I'm looking forward to understanding the story more fully this time around.

Oh and while writing the above I suddenly remembered that Juan Coderch made his Attic Greek translation freely available some years ago. If only I had remembered it last month instead of moaning, as I did on this log, about the lack of extensive reading opportunities!

Anyway thanks to the encouraging comments I received here, my reading of Xenophon's Anabasis has gotten underway, but with a twist: my obsessive-compulsive tendencies are acting up and I find myself unable to resist chasing each and every reference to Goodwin's Greek Grammar which the editors have inserted all over my copy of the Anabasis (Mather & Hewitt). So the exercise which I hoped would have me reading extensively has actually turned into an intensive one.

Zulu

At long last I finished listen-reading the Gospel of St Matthew and I am now continuing with St Mark. My method is still the same: I listen to a chapter 5 times in one sitting, L2R2 thrice then L2R1 twice. During L2R2 my main focus is on tracking the syllables on the page as I hear them. I still cannot do it reliably until the third repetition. Occasionally I get the satisfaction of recognising some words and grammatical structures already seen in the course Say It in Zulu.
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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby Beosweyne » Mon Oct 04, 2021 8:44 pm

Last month I spent 78 hours on learning languages:
september-21.png

The 6WC which ended mid-September was quite a success as it carried me all the way to lesson 10 of Thackston's Arabic textbook. I enjoyed sending in my study times at the end of each day and seeing my place on the leaderboard gradually improving. I eventually placed 7th.

Making plans

So I was somewhat euphoric for a while, and I actually considered skipping NaNoWriMo to do the next 6WC. However that only aggravated my NaNo mania, and for the past few days I have been preoccupied with planning my next Latin Magnum Opus. This time I have a solid plan to hit the 50,000-word winning target! I know it's very bold considering my previous outputs were just 19k (2018), 8k (2019) and 10k (2020), but November 2021 is going to be different for these reasons...

#1 - Free time. It sounds drastic, but I am going to suspend all other learning activities in November in order to have 2-3 hours per day free for writing. However, I have Greek and Hieroglyphics assignments due in November which I need to do in advance starting right now. And to make time for that I am going to have to set aside French, Afrikaans, isiZulu and Arabic from now on. I dread to see how badly decayed my level is going to be when I get back to those languages in December.

#2 - Quantity over quality. I am going to freewrite with little care for the quality of either my Latin or storytelling craft generally. NaNoWriMo is about creating a first draft after all. Previously I tended to ponder over a sentence for minutes, consulting dictionaries, fretting over word choice and grammar, plot and character development, etc. So this year I am going to take less care over all that and just write my raw stream of consciousness, at least to the extent my active vocabulary allows.

#3 - Not handwriting. It's not that my handwriting can't keep up with the rate at which I can produce Latin (12 to 15 words per minute). It's more that I usually obsess over the neatness of my manuscript which in turn creates 101 justifications for procrastinating. For example if I noticed my fingertips were greasy, or my favourite brand of paper was not within reach, I would put off writing. Likewise the fear of having to cross out anything would hold me back from writing the first word of a sentence until the whole sentence had formed in my mind.

So this year I am going to type on my laptop. Last week I wrote a script (for Emacs) to create an environment for the kind of quantity-first-quality-be-damned writing I have in mind. The main thing it does is hide all but the last word typed! Now I don't feel compelled to correct or otherwise edit anything while drafting. Out of sight, out of mind. The way it works is you choose a target word-count at the start of a writing session, together with the desired duration (100 words in 7 minutes suits me) and then as you write, it displays a progress bar on top indicating how many words remain. It also shows a simplistic estimate of the eventual writing period. This screenshot was taken after typing about 30 words:
emacs-1.png

Upon reaching the target word-count the entire passage is revealed. It is not unusual for me to commit so many errors of inflection: "agrum meum" -> "agri mei", "in currum" -> "in curru", "malum accolam" -> "malus accola", "viderat" -> "videram":
emacs-2.png
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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby Beosweyne » Sun Oct 31, 2021 11:20 am

Ancient Greek & Middle Egyptian

My plan worked and I completed my November assignments ahead of time. In so doing I think I set a new personal record for most study hours in one month for Ancient Greek: 25 hours, and Middle Egyptian: 32 hours!

In summary, I translated 9 short passages from Greek Beyond GCSE, including a few by Thucydides on the conflict in and around the isle of Sphacteria around 425 BC. Also some legal speeches by Lycurgus (a charge of treason), Antiphon (murder) and Lysias (more murder).

Then from Middle Egyptian Grammar I translated a page of the 20th century BC Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, in which the sailor finally gets to board a ship home. Also 2 pages from the annals of Thutmose III on that king's expedition against rebels in Canaan around 1455 BC.

With those out of the way my November is going to be free for...

NaNoWriMo in Latin

So to recap what I wrote in my previous post: I have just one objective for this year's NaNoWriMo, and that is to draft a 50,000 word story. I want to achieve that regardless of the quality of my storytelling (not great) or of my Latin (not at all great -- especially as I will draw on my active vocabulary, avoiding the dictionary as much as I can).

Therefore October was all about establishing a writing routine and getting accustomed to writing quickly. I made sure to write for at least 15 minutes each day, and on certain days I managed to put in a whole hour, but always in 5-15 minute spurts. Any longer, and my pace would slacken due to overthinking the story or just mental fatigue. Unfortunately all that practice has not improved my writing speed, which is still as it was a few weeks ago: 13 words per minute.

I was actually writing a continuous story during those practice sessions, one which I thought I would throw away at the end of October, yet developed into something I found entertaining. In it my hapless main character is condemned to death on a charge trumped up by his influential neighbour; by chance he is offered clemency in return for being the subject of an experiment by top Roman scientists (well, augurs); and boom! suddenly he finds himself on a raft off the desolate shores of the Aries constellation. I also wrote scenes from a century after these events, in which a descendant of his uncovers a conspiracy to end Roman rule over the space colonies. It may not be a story worth continuing, but at least it prompted me to write 11,000 words.

On to NaNoWriMo itself. I have this idea for how the story should start: Cassius is an elderly and infirm tenant living on the top floor of an insula (Roman multi-storey building -- usually the upper floors were cheapest to rent). Following a minor tremor the roof collapses. In pitch darkess Cassius senses a cavity in the rubble and crawls down... and realises that he is not in Rome anymore. So begins a descent through time and space.

I even commissioned at great expensedrew in MS Paint this splendid cover image. The title Descensus Multiplex means a twisty descent.
Cover2021.png


Noli quaeso imagini illi ridere, quae etsi tam rustice depicta, tamen nescio an tandem artibus excedat reliquam partem libri :mrgreen:

De Cassi casu supra scribebam paucum tantum quia, cum in amore tum in fabulando, saepe ardor noster nimio praescientiae exstinguitur. Attamen licet mihi saltem addere haec. Senex descendens inveniet se denuo praecipua tempora vitae experiri: suam juventutem, pueritiam aliosque aevos reviset. Sed quocumque translatus erit eo haud diu manebit, utpote pronus ad delabendum sive per foramina sive de cataractis aliove modo (atqui semper incolumis!) Et Cassius quo altius descendet, eo magis miro modo resuscitabuntur ejus facultates videndi, currendi, etc. Ceterum fieri potest ut interdum Cassium dejiciam apud alienos, e.g. Australopithecos homines in antro, vel exploratores nostri fere aevi in planeta Martis.
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MorkTheFiddle
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Languages: English (N). Read (only) French and Spanish. Studying Ancient Greek. Studying a bit of Latin. Once studied Old Norse. Dabbled in Catalan, Provençal and Italian.
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Sun Oct 31, 2021 4:49 pm

Ah, the infamous Roman foray into the galaxy! Love it!
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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby Beosweyne » Wed Dec 01, 2021 1:26 pm

My Descensus Multiplex hit 30k words just as the first bells of December started to toll. So another year passes with NaNoWriMo's 50k winning target still eluding me. Everything was going great at first but then we had a medical emergency at home. I put writing to one side in order to provide care and support. As the health situation thankfully improved, I gradually put more effort back into it as you can see:
daily-word-count-2021.png


But looking on the bright side, this is now my second longest written work in any language---only the thesis I completed in 1997 was longer. Well OK but they're not really comparable are they? I mean one was painstakingly researched over 3 years, while the other was hacked together in 30 days in a language I'm barely literate in. (But which one is which? :mrgreen: )

Away from language learning, today I signed up for Advent of Code, an online computer programming contest held every December. Two programming challenges are set each day. Today's ones were merely warm-up exercises, but they get progressively tougher in the days leading up to Christmas.
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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's assorted A1s and A2s

Postby Beosweyne » Sat Jan 01, 2022 9:24 am

It was all the fault of Advent of Code that very little language learning took place in December. I enjoyed spending hours and hours on these coding challenges along with 200,000 other competitors. Each day leading up to Christmas we were treated to two puzzles, and there was an unfolding story to accompany them: a silly undersea quest to retrieve the keys to Santa's sleigh. By the end I had solved nearly puzzles except for 5: 2 on day 19 that I didn't even attempt since I am very weak at 3D geometry; another 2 on day 23 when my ill-conceived program failed to find a solution even after processing for 4 hours continuously; and the final one on day 25 which only gets unlocked once you solve all the earlier puzzles.

Latin + Lisp

"Calamitas! Sunt hodie kalendas Decembras sed clavis carpenti ('sleigh') Sancti Nicolai amissa est. Nisi clavem a fundo mari receperis, non poterit ille orbem terrarum circumvolare dona tributum. Felici casu vehiculum summersum ('submarine') tibi commodatur quo conscenso locum clavis quærere potes."

Tale erat propositum certaminis 'Advent of Code'. Hoc quóque anno certatur mense Decembro inter participes qui plerumque artem programmandi ('computer programming') exercere cupiunt. Cottidie usque ad festi diem duo ænigmata revelantur quæ ordinatoribus ('computers') solvantur. Denique ii laudem merentur qui quinquaginta ænigmata enodant. Quamquam quinquies ingenium me defecit, satis lætus sum quod reliqua quadraginta quinque opera ad tempus complevi.

Primum ænigma sic exponitur. Instrumentum quoddam metitur quanto fundus maris distet a superficie, deinde eas altitudines nobis nuntiat in serie numerorum, sicut 220, 270, 130, 80, 90, 130, etc. Hinc necesse est numerare quoties reperiantur bini numeri adjacentes, quorum alter excedat primum. Apud numeros supra datos tres tales binos cernimus: 220->270, 80->90 et 90->130. Idcirco linguá 'Lisp' functionem scripsi quæ ad quantumvis datos numeros recte respondet:

Code: Select all

(defun quot-bini-crescunt (numeri)
  (let ((summa 0)
        ;; E primis numeris omitte postremum.
        (primi (butlast numeri))
        ;; E secundis omitte caput.
        (secundi (rest numeri)))
    (mapc (lambda (primus secundus)
            ;; Si secundus major est, summam auge.
            (when (> secundus primus)
              (incf summa)))
          primi
          secundi)
    ;; Tandem summam reddito.
    summa))
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