Beosweyne learns more Zulu in 2023

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księżycowy
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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby księżycowy » Mon Jan 18, 2021 8:58 pm

I see, thank you for the summary. I think I shall stick with some of the other resources I have, based on your remarks.
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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby Beosweyne » Fri Jan 22, 2021 3:05 pm

Afrikaans

In the life-sciences textbook I'm reading, intended for South African schools, I've reached a section on traditional or indigenous African medicine. Not what you would have expected to see in a science textbook. Here is an interesting snippet:

In Suid-Afrika is daar oor die algemeen twee tipes genesers: die kruiedokters en die waarsêers. Kruiedokters skryf plante voor vir kwale. Waarsêers kommunikeer na bewering met die voorvaders se geeste om probleme en kwale te diagnoseer. In Afrika maak tradisionele genesers staat op tot 4000 plante vir medisyne. ’n Voorbeeld is Pygneum, ’n tradisionele middel wat in Afrika en elders gebruik word om vroeë vorms van kanker te behandel.

I hope my translation is not wrong: "In South Africa there are in general 2 types of healers: herbal doctors (kruiedokters) and diviners (waarsêers). Herbal doctors prescribe plants for ailments. Diviners allegedly communicate with spirits of ancestors in order to diagnose problems and ailments. In Africa, traditional healers rely on up to 4000 plants for medicines. An example is Pygneum, a traditional remedy which is used in Africa and elsewhere in order to treat early forms of cancer."

Zulu

Meanwhile in Say It In Zulu I met the word inyanga, which means 'traditional practitioner'. I don't know which of the aforementioned kruiedokter or waarsêer they correspond to. There also happens to be different inyanga meaning 'moon', with the two words differing only in the pitch of the final syllable:
inyanga.jpg
After spending the last 2 weeks repeating the drills in lesson 5.1 of this book, I am now quite familiar with the tonal system for nouns, at least those nouns with monosyllabic & disyllabic stems (see pp. 16 & 17). For the time being I will not study the appendix where the authors present their theory of tones in more detail.

Unfortunately for us learners, tones are not indicated in standard isiZulu spelling. The only online dictionary I know of isizulu.net doesn't mark tones.
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Learn More Zulu: 28 / 468 (p. 28/468)

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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby Beosweyne » Mon Jan 25, 2021 6:09 am

Week 3 in summary.

Afrikaans
  • TY Afrikaans, 37% (+4)
  • Graad 10 Lewenswetenskappe, 42% (+3)
  • Hoe verklaar jy dit, 12/Jan/2020 episode.
Ancient Greek
  • Greek Beyond GCSE, 48% (-)
  • True Stories, 93% (+5)
Classical Arabic
  • Routledge Intro. to Qur'anic Arabic, 22% (+1)
French
  • Que sais-je? La religion romaine, 27% (+6)
  • Tintin - le Lotus bleu, ep. 4.
Latin
  • Roma Aeterna & exercitia, 72% (+0.5)
  • Selections from 'De Bello Gallico', 20% (+9)
  • Composition, wrote 285 words.
Middle Egyptian
  • Middle Egyptian Grammar, 51% (+1)
Zulu
  • Say It In Zulu, 9% (+1)
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Learn More Zulu: 28 / 468 (p. 28/468)

CC93
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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby CC93 » Fri Jan 29, 2021 8:29 pm

What is the driver behind learning Zulu and what are your thoughts on the course you are using now?
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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby Beosweyne » Sat Jan 30, 2021 7:37 pm

Hi and thanks for writing, CC93.

Zulu

In the last few days I found some additional learning materials I could use straight away.

Most importantly, after months of searching in vain for isiZulu audio with transcripts, I finally checked the most obvious source: Bible translation sites. Sure enough there is a parallel English-isiZulu Bible (KJV) with audio. I have started listen-reading the book of Matthew.

Also, I found a Zulu 'phrase of the day' radio show for English speakers. Most episodes are around 3 minutes long. I have downloaded several to listen to from time to time.

CC93 wrote:What is the driver behind learning Zulu and what are your thoughts on the course you are using now?

Mainly I am curious about the sounds of this language, and others of the Nguni family. At first I couldn't decide which one of them to learn (isiZulu, isiXhosa, Siswati or others) but when I found Say It In Zulu with audio for free online, I had to pick isiZulu. I have found no beginner's resource for the other languages this comprehensive and detailed.

It's a 'programmed audio' course from 1979 that's seemingly aimed at an academic audience, most likely in a university setting. Of the audio drills I've done so far, most require you to listen and mimic the pronunciation, others prompt you to substitute words in a sentence pattern or supply missing lines of dialogue. It seems the principal author David Rycroft was a noted researcher in African musicology and linguistics, which is apparent from how e.g. they use terms from phonology without introduction, and provide musical transcriptions of Zulu songs.

I am working through it very slowly to make sure I can do all the drills and understand the theory in one section before moving to the next. I fully expect to take 2 years to complete it. One problem I forsee is that the most complete copy of the audio I have found (see item B03 at the archived CeLTIE site) only goes up to lesson 42 out of a total of 52, and so I might be forced to study the final lessons without accompanying audio.

The highlight of the course for me has been this song, We Maphephuka, in which the singer blames a man for snitching on him to the police (listen here with volume turned way up).
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Learn More Zulu: 28 / 468 (p. 28/468)

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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby Beosweyne » Mon Feb 01, 2021 11:47 am

Progress in week 4, 2021.

Afrikaans
  • TY Afrikaans, 41% (+4). I struggled for 3 hours doing exercises at the end of chapter 17, resulting in some of my other activities getting neglected (all the '-' signs below!) Not a fan of separable verbs in Afrikaans.
  • Graad 10 Lewenswetenskappe, 43% (+1)
  • Hoe verklaar jy dit, 20/Oct/2019 episode.
Ancient Greek
  • Greek Beyond GCSE, 48% (-)
  • True Stories, 96% (+3)
Classical Arabic
  • Routledge Intro. to Qur'anic Arabic, 23% (+1)
French
  • Que sais-je? La religion romaine, 31% (+4)
  • Tintin - le Lotus bleu, ep. 5 (complete). I will start listening to Les sept boules de cristal next. There are only 6 Tintin adventures in the series, and now even those—Sapristi!—have several episodes marked 'son indisponible' at France Culture. However I found the missing parts at podbean.com.
Latin
  • Roma Aeterna & exercitia, 72% (-)
  • Selections from 'De Bello Gallico', 26% (+6). I've finished reading the extracts from book 1. Extracts from book 4 will follow.
  • Composition, wrote 410 words.
Middle Egyptian
  • Middle Egyptian Grammar, 52% (+1)
Zulu
  • Say It In Zulu, 9% (-)
  • Listen-read IBhayibheli iTestamente eliSha, Mathewu 1. My latest project is listen-reading the NT, or at least the book of Matthew. I spent 30 minutes on chapter 1: first I listened to the audio 3 times straight while looking at the isiZulu text (L2R2) until I could make out the spoken word-boundaries sufficiently well; then I did L2R1 a couple of times (isiZulu audio, English text).
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Learn More Zulu: 28 / 468 (p. 28/468)

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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby Beosweyne » Thu Feb 04, 2021 12:22 pm

Ancient Greek

I've crossed an important milestone by reading for the first time a complete work from cover to cover, True Stories (Ἀληθῆ Διηγήματα) by Lucian of Samosata.

My task was greatly simplified thanks to the edition I was using by Prof. Constantine Hadavas, whose linguistic and historical notes take up much more room than Lucian's text itself. The work is a satire on many events and celebrities of Greek history and mythology, but the satire is not always overt, so Hadavas discusses some of the competing interpretations. His linguistic help is very generous, including vocabulary lists on every page, parses of even common verbal forms, and indications of even slightly unusual constructions where they occur (e.g. genitive absolute, accusative of respect, odd word orderings). If you are teaching Greek, hide this book from your students as it plainly shows all the answers :lol: You might hide it all the more carefully if they are quite young, because the story is definitely racy in places.

Even though Lucian lived many centuries after the Attic dialect ceased to be spoken, he deliberately wrote in the archaic dialect, as Hadavas says "only occasionally deviating from earlier usages... The majority of Lucian's non-Attic elements involve vocabulary, approx. 20% of which is non-Attic."

My second text is going to be one that predates Lucian by over 500 years, Xenophon's Anabasis, a first-hand account of a Greek military expedition inside the Persian empire. My edition is the one by Mather & Hewitt containing books 1-4 of the Anabasis. It has 175 pages of Greek text and about as many pages of notes. Even so, the notes are not as comprehensive or generally user-friendly as Hadavas' commentary on Lucian, so I anticipate taking 6 months to read through it at a page per day. I am going to start next week, but before that I will read the 40-page historical introduction.
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Learn More Zulu: 28 / 468 (p. 28/468)

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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby Beli Tsar » Thu Feb 04, 2021 2:11 pm

Beosweyne wrote:Ancient Greek

I've crossed an important milestone by reading for the first time a complete work from cover to cover, True Stories (Ἀληθῆ Διηγήματα) by Lucian of Samosata.

My task was greatly simplified thanks to the edition I was using by Prof. Constantine Hadavas, whose linguistic and historical notes take up much more room than Lucian's text itself.

Well done! Lucian is good fun, isn't he?

Beosweyne wrote:Ancient Greek
My second text is going to be one that predates Lucian by over 500 years, Xenophon's Anabasis, a first-hand account of a Greek military expedition inside the Persian empire. My edition is the one by Mather & Hewitt containing books 1-4 of the Anabasis. It has 175 pages of Greek text and about as many pages of notes. Even so, the notes are not as comprehensive or generally user-friendly as Hadavas' commentary on Lucian, so I anticipate taking 6 months to read through it at a page per day. I am going to start next week, but before that I will read the 40-page historical introduction.

Good luck. I've never (yet) finished the whole of the Anabasis, but Bedwere's recording here https://librivox.org/anabasis-by-xenophon/ is really excellent. There is a text and recording for a simplified Anabasis out there, too, if that's your thing.
And you might find it's possible to move faster than with Lucian - the vocabulary for some sections is quite repetitive ('And then we marched three stages, thirty parasangs to x, an inhabited city, prosperous and large'.
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Beosweyne
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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby Beosweyne » Thu Feb 04, 2021 8:59 pm

Beli Tsar wrote:Good luck. I've never (yet) finished the whole of the Anabasis, but Bedwere's recording here https://librivox.org/anabasis-by-xenophon/ is really excellent. There is a text and recording for a simplified Anabasis out there, too, if that's your thing.
And you might find it's possible to move faster than with Lucian - the vocabulary for some sections is quite repetitive ('And then we marched three stages, thirty parasangs to x, an inhabited city, prosperous and large'.

That's a relief to know: constantly having to look up new words would kill my motivation. I've now downloaded the audio you linked to, and book 1 alone is 2 hours long! I'll try to come up with a plan to fit listening to that recording into my study schedule.
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Learn More Zulu: 28 / 468 (p. 28/468)

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MorkTheFiddle
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Re: Beosweyne's log

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Fri Feb 05, 2021 6:57 pm

Beosweyne wrote:Ancient Greek

I've crossed an important milestone by reading for the first time a complete work from cover to cover, True Stories (Ἀληθῆ Διηγήματα) by Lucian of Samosata.

My second text is going to be one that predates Lucian by over 500 years, Xenophon's Anabasis, a first-hand account of a Greek military expedition inside the Persian empire. My edition is the one by Mather & Hewitt containing books 1-4 of the Anabasis.

Congratulations on finishing Ἀληθῆ Διηγήματα by Lucian. It is an accomplishment you will remember for as long as you live.

Geoffrey Steadman has edited books 1, 3, and 4 of the Anabasis, which you can download here. His free editions are helpful in the same way that Hadavas' version of Lucian is helpful. By the by, Steadman notes, "If you are new to the Anabasis, I recommend that you read Books 1 and 4 before you consider Book 3."
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