Kundê qehweyî diçe dibistanê --- Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

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Brun Ugle
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Sep 20, 2021 5:22 pm

My class is over now. There are no new levels. Friday was the last day of class and it was kind of sad. It was also a bit nerve-wracking because, out of five students, I was the only one that showed up, so I had to answer all the questions and do all the exercises myself. It’s also recorded, which added to the pressure a bit. I had a nice chat with the teacher though and we went through some questions that I had sent him, and he said that I can continue to send him questions at any time. He even invited me to drop by for a visit if I ever happen to be in Iraq.

I might have been my fault that no one else showed up. When this level started, I asked him when he was going teach us how to talk about unreal/hypothetical situations in the past. Up to that point, he had only taught us the present subjunctive. So, he taught us one way (the easiest way) to form the imperfect subjunctive. Then on Monday, he taught us the more common way to form the imperfect subjunctive. There were only two of us in class that day and we struggled a bit with it. I understood it and had seen it used before (I’ve been reading The Little Prince in LWT), but I still struggled a bit to get it right as it is a tiny bit complicated and the classes were a little too late in the evening for my brain. Then at the end of that lesson, I opened my big mouth again asking, “But you’ve only taught us the imperfect subjunctive, what about the preterite subjunctive and the pluperfect subjunctive?” And then I sent him a list of sentences taken from The Little Prince and some other books using the preterite subjunctive. So, that’s what he taught in our last class, and maybe part of the reason no one else showed up.

Since class ended, I’ve been taking it a bit easy. I feel like a little break of sorts could be good for me, but I intend to get back to working on the textbook and doing other serious study next week. For now, I’m just doing some LWT and watching a series and whatever else I feel like. I haven’t studied at all today yet. I just worked in the garden and went for a walk.

I keep having to remind myself that it took me a while to develop my listening comprehension in Spanish too. I keep feeling like I should understand this series by now since I’m almost 30 episodes in. But it took me at least that many episodes to understand my first Spanish telenovela and Spanish is objectively easier than Kurdish (for an English speaker), my level was higher when I started watching, and I had already listened to loads of materials for beginners, including a telenovela for learners, a comedy for learners, numerous episodes of a podcast, and loads of FSI dialogues and drills. Most of that stuff doesn’t exist for Kurdish, so I had to jump in at the deep end. I really can’t expect better comprehension than I have. The thing is, I understand some of the episodes pretty well and every time that happens, I get fooled into thinking I’ve finally made it, only to have my comprehension drop again in the next episode. It drops especially whenever they introduce a new character. A few episodes ago, a crazy uncle showed up, and then in the last episode that I saw, they suddenly switched out the actress playing one of my favorite characters with another actress that I don’t feel plays her as well. The character just suddenly disappeared and then came back with her face wrapped in bandages because she’d had plastic surgery or something. It was an amazing transformation! :lol:
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby luke » Mon Sep 20, 2021 6:34 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:A few episodes ago, a crazy uncle showed up, and then in the last episode that I saw, they suddenly switched out the actress playing one of my favorite characters with another actress that I don’t feel plays her as well. The character just suddenly disappeared and then came back with her face wrapped in bandages because she’d had plastic surgery or something. It was an amazing transformation! :lol:

That IS funny!

Thanks for the signposts along the way.

I can see how your classmates would have gotten nervous :)
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Mon Sep 20, 2021 8:31 pm

Brun Ugle wrote:A few episodes ago, a crazy uncle showed up, and then in the last episode that I saw, they suddenly switched out the actress playing one of my favorite characters with another actress that I don’t feel plays her as well. The character just suddenly disappeared and then came back with her face wrapped in bandages because she’d had plastic surgery or something. It was an amazing transformation! :lol:


That made me think of the classic soap Dynasty - Al Corey who played the character Steven Carrington quit, was replaced by Jack Coleman, and the explanation was that Steven had undergone plastic surgery after an oil rig explosion. :roll:
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Brun Ugle
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Brun Ugle » Mon Oct 04, 2021 9:02 am

A couple of weeks have gone by again, and now I’m suddenly a Norwegian citizen. :D I just got the letter on Friday. So now they can’t kick me out. Maybe.

I thought it would take them until next year to finish processing my application, so I was rather surprised to get it now. Last week I’d gotten a scary letter saying I needed to provide more information on my Norwegian language competence. I only had three weeks to come up with something and it was even less because I was sick and didn’t bother to open the letter the first couple of days. (I thought it was only another one of their monthly letters saying they were still processing my application.) I had thought that I had sent everything they required, but they require an oral Norwegian exam and when I took the Bergens test some 18-19 years ago, there wasn’t an oral portion. They gave me a way around it if I could prove I’d attended a Norwegian college or university and that the courses were taught in Norwegian. Well, I sent in my diploma and transcript, but I wasn’t sure how to prove that the classes were in Norwegian. So, I spent three or four hours on the phone over the course of two days trying to get through to ask them what they wanted. It turned out that they would accept a letter from the university. So, I ran down there (it’s just the other side of the woods from my house), and explained my problem to the lady at the reception desk. She was really nice and wrote the letter right away and by the time I got home, it was there in my e-mail. I sent it in and already two days later, I was a citizen. It seemed so strangely easy after all that stress, that I still have to check the letter every once in a while, to make sure I didn’t misunderstand and that there isn’t a catch. :)

Last weekend we were supposed to have a dinner party with a whole bunch of Kurdish friends. I had a bad feeling about it the whole time, but I had agreed to it. First, I got sick and couldn’t prepare as early as I wanted. But I got better after a couple of days and went around to the thrift store to get more plates and flatware and things. On the morning of the party, I cleaned the upstairs and moved the cat and all her toys and cat furniture to the guestroom. Then my boyfriend and I cleaned the downstairs together and he started cooking. I went upstairs to study a bit, but I heard them call and went down to check because I’d had a weird feeling the whole time that they wouldn’t come. He said it wasn’t anything like that and that they were coming, so I studied a bit more, then went down to help a little with the last few things and make sure everything was set up. When everything was ready and the food in the oven, we just sat around waiting for them. Then half an hour before they were to come, they rang again. One of them had fallen off her bicycle on the way to us and probably broken her arm, but the rest of them would still come. So, my boyfriend went to help the woman who had fallen and he, she, her husband and their neighbor all went to the emergency room, while I had to lead the others (the other women and all the children) to our house and take care of them. The thing is, none of them speaks much Norwegian and I don’t speak much Kurdish, and I’m socially awkward and uncomfortable in that kind of situation in any case. So, we waited for an hour. The kids played with the toys I have for visitors and everyone else just sat around. Finally, my boyfriend called again, but he couldn’t come home. He had to go with the woman to the hospital because she also doesn’t speak Norwegian. So, we were to just eat without the others. We were almost finished eating when the neighbor who’d stayed behind came. I find him much easier to talk to because he knows how to speak to foreigners who don’t speak the language well, so it got a bit more comfortable then. Still, the whole thing was very unpleasant and I don’t have any desire to give any more dinner parties any time soon.

I’ve not been making much progress with Kurdish since my class ended. I’m at that awkward phase when everything is too difficult or too easy. There isn’t really a lot of materials for learners, but especially not for learners who get past the very basics. I’m still working through the last level of the textbook series I have and still watching my TV show, sometimes understanding a bit and sometimes not so much. I really wish there were some graded readers and podcasts made for learners like you can find for Spanish, but there aren’t. So, today I wrote to another teacher that looks like she might be pretty good at helping people develop speaking skills. I don’t know how much her classes cost though and I don’t know when she’s available. I’ve also decided to push myself a bit to do other things with the language. Since my class ended, I’ve hardly done anything besides LWT and watching TV, so now I’m trying to do a little bit of textbook work, a little writing, a little self-talk and a little extensive reading every day in addition.

I had a nice experience the other day with my series. The various characters all have catch phrases that they say several times in almost every episode, and I have been trying to figure out what they are saying for ages now. The other day, I happened by chance to stumble across one of them. The one character says this one phrase all the time and I couldn’t find it in my dictionary or Wikipedia, partly because I didn’t know how to spell it and also wasn’t even sure if it was Kurdish or if it was Turkish or Arabic as they frequently borrow words and expressions from those languages. It sounded like he was saying something like “yarabî” or “yara bî” but no matter how I tried to spell it or divide it, I couldn’t find it in any of my Turkish or Kurdish dictionaries. But the other day, I was flipping through the dictionary looking for something completely different, when I noticed the entry for “ya” and as an example under it, the phrase “Ya rebî!” which it turns out means “Oh my God!” I had previously only learned the word “xwedê” for “God” in Kurdish, but of course Kurdish always has at least three or four words all meaning the same thing and all those words have at least three or four spellings each. :?
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Iversen » Mon Oct 04, 2021 9:53 am

Gratulerer med din nye status !
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Brun Ugle
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Re: Brun Ugle tries a more sensible approach, one language at a time (first up = Kurmanji)

Postby Brun Ugle » Sun Nov 07, 2021 4:01 pm

I haven’t really done so well since my last Kurdish class ended. I barely studied at all for a month or so, but now I’m getting back into it, sort of. I’ve also been struggling a little with stress, anxiety and depression. Mostly all fairly mild, but still unpleasant. I think the whole lockdown thing was great for me. The whole world just went sort of quiet and there weren’t really any expectations. I didn’t have to see people or go places or do things. I know it was horrible for most people, but it was very nice for me, for the most part. But that’s over now, plus winter is coming and it rained constantly here for about a month or so, and then they had to change the stupid clocks again. My brain doesn’t handle changing the clocks very well. It can’t seem to just move everything over one hour. It goes through a whole crisis, like “What is time? 3 in the morning, 3 in the afternoon. What’s the difference? Why does it matter?” It doesn’t help that it’s been so dark due to the time of year and the constant rain.

So, right now, I’m studying some, but also taking things a bit easy, trying to concentrate a little more on my health once again. I’m also trying to figure out how to reincorporate some real Spanish and German study into my routine. I had hoped to learn Kurdish fairly quickly by concentrating exclusively on it, but that isn’t happening and meanwhile, my other languages are disappearing. So, once I’m feeling a bit better, I’m going to try to squeeze in an hour or so of some kind of study per week in Spanish and if that goes well, also German.
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Re: Kundê qehweyî diçe dibistanê

Postby Brun Ugle » Tue Nov 23, 2021 1:10 pm

Don’t trust Google Translate. Scroll down for English.
Sorry to all Kurds for my terrible Kurdish. You can avoid the horror and scroll down for English too if you want.


Kundê qehweyî diçe dibistanê

Pir kêfxweş im. Min hemû pirtûkên ji bo xwendekarên kurdî yên li Rojavayê dîtine. Waneyan jî li YouTubê hatine tomarkirin. Ez dikarim li Kurdistanê "biçim" dibistanê! Berî, pir zehmet bû, ji ber ku min nikarî materyalên li astayeke rast a ji bo min bibînim. Lê xûya dike ku ev pirtûk û wane dê ji bo min pir feyda bibin.

Min pola yekem di tenê sê hefteyan de qedand. (Wek berê hat gotin, ez pir jîr im. :lol: ) Di pola yekem de min Bîrkarî, Muzîk, Wênesazî, Werziş û Zimanê kurdî xwendin. Waneyên li YouTubê tenê ji bo bîrkarî û zimanê kurdî hebûn, lê min hemû pirtûk bikaranîna LWT xwendin. Di dersên bîrkarîyê de ez fêrî hejmarên ji sifir heta bîst, komkirin, derxistin, û teşe û gewdeyên geometrîk bûm. Di waneyên muzîkê ez hînî pile û pêlekana mûzikê, rîtm û gelek sirûdan bûm. Di waneyên wênesazî ez hînî reng, teşe û rengkirinê bûm. Di weneyên werzişê de ez hîn bûm ku sebze û werziş ji bo tendrustiyê pir baş in. Herî dawî, di dersên zimanê kurdî de ez fêrî alfebeyê bûm.

Ji ber ku ez ji berê ve hemû wan tiştan baş dizanim (ji bîr nekin -- ez pir jîr im, ji xwendekarê pola yekem a asayî jîrtir im), ez dikarim her tişt fehm bikim û waneyan wek "i+1 input" bi kar bînim. Ez li hêviyê me ku dest bi pola duyem bikim. Ji bilî van dersan, derseke nû heye -- Civak û jiyan. Pir balkeş xuya dike.

Erê, ez vedigerim dibistanê -- ji destpekê ve. Ez nizamin ez ê bikarim çiqas bigihêjim, lê hêvî dikim ez ê di dawiyê de hemû 12 polan biqedînim. Ez bawer dikim ku heke ez hemû 12 polan biqedînim, dê kurdiya min gelekî baş bibe.


Brun Ugle (Brown Owl) goes to school

I am very happy. I’ve found all the books for Kurdish students in the Rojava region (Western Kurdistan / Syrian Kurdistan). The classes are on YouTube. I can "go" to school in Kurdistan! Before, it was very difficult, because I couldn’t find materials at the right level for me. But it seems that these books and classes will be very useful to me.

I finished first grade in just three weeks. (As mentioned before, I am very smart. :lol:) In first grade, I studied Mathematics, Music, Art, PE and Kurdish Language. There were only lessons for Kurdish and Math on YouTube, but I read all the books using LWT. In math class, I learned the numbers from zero to twenty, addition, subtraction, and 2D and 3D geometric shapes. In music class, I learned the musical staff and scale, rhythm and many songs. In art lessons, I learned color, shapes and coloring. In PE, I learned that vegetables and exercise are very good for our health. Lastly, I learned the alphabet in Kurdish language classes.

Since I already know all of these things well (remember - I'm very smart, smarter than the average first grader), I can understand everything and use the classes as "i + 1 input". I am looking forward to starting second grade. In addition to these classes, there is a new class - Society and Life. It looks very interesting.

Yes, I'm going back to school - from the beginning. I don’t know how far I will get, but hopefully I will eventually finish all 12 grades. I think if I complete all 12 grades, my Kurdish will be very good.
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