עִבְרִית לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד

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Deinonysus
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Re: עברית 2022

Postby Deinonysus » Sat Jun 25, 2022 8:27 pm

עברית

Making pretty good progress. For Modern Hebrew, I just have half a lesson left in Unit 1 of Pimsleur. I should be done reviewing and on to new material in a few weeks, and I could have the whole course finished by the end of the summer.

I've cleared out all of my Anki decks for Biblical Hebrew. I'm almost done reviewing chapter 6. The next three chapters after that are also review. I have the vocab for chapter 10 in my Anki decks, but I haven't gone over the chapter yet so it won't be review. That'll be the first chapter to introduce the adapted text of Ruth, which is exciting!

English

I'm trying to get back into reading novels. I started reading Frankenstein, which is a real page turner! Maybe this will be the summer of great women writers. I also got a copy of the Earthsea books so that's next.

Français

We're talking about possibly taking a trip to France, so I need to work on my listening comprehension! I'm trying to watch France24 every day but I haven't managed to actually watch it more once. Hopefully I'll be able to get back into the habit.
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Re: עברית 2022

Postby Deinonysus » Tue Jul 05, 2022 3:03 am

עִבְרִית

I'm progressing. I'm almost done reviewing and I'll be on new material soon. Actually, there is already a bit of new material in Pimsleur. I think they changed the course since I last did it. They covered the allative suffix "-ah", so for example הָעִיר ("ha'ír") is "the city", and הָעִירָה ("ha'íra") is "to the city." I've heard of this in Biblical Hebrew, but I've never heard it used in Modern Hebrew before, so that was new to me!

I should be finishing up Chapter 7 of my Biblical Hebrew book soon, and after that I'll only have two more review chapters.

: 34 / 90 Pimsleur Hebrew
: 7 / 30 First Hebrew Primer

Ancient and Modern Languages

I am really enjoying my method for learning Hebrew, learning the spoken modern language but ignoring the modern written language in favor of learning the ancient language using a reconstructed pronunciation to learn the writing. This bypasses obnoxious arcane spelling that no longer matches the spoken language, while also providing an excellent classical language for polyliteracy purposes. Depending on my results, I'd like to apply this method to Ancient and Modern Greek and Classical and Mandarin Chinese. I know Chinese doesn't have spelling per say, but most Chinese characters have a phonetic component and Middle Chinese pronunciation would be much more helpful for learning the characters than modern pronunciation.

My current sketch of the method is:
  1. Phase 1: Assorted beginner materials <-- I am here
    • Learn the spoken Modern Language with Pimsleur followed by FSI
    • Learn a reconstructed pronunciation system
    • Study the ancient language using a grammar or two, doing the exercises out loud without writing anything down. This encourages thinking in the language rather than just translating it.
  2. Phase 2: Memorize classic texts.
    • I was raised Jewish, although I do not practice. Now that I have more vocabulary and a good command of basic grammar, I have a lot of prayers from my childhood that I learned 2-3 decades ago popping into my head, and suddenly I understand them (or at least good chunks of them). I had a similar experience with German and French; I studied classical music in college and learned Lieder and arias without a strong understanding of the language, but as I learned grammar, lines would pop into my head and I would think, oh that's what that means! And I would often be able to remember certain word forms or the gender of a noun by thinking of music where I've heard it. So I believe that the memorization of classic texts will be more effective than just memorizing word lists or even doing extensive reading, because this way I'll have the words memorized in context. And the use of a phonetic pronunciation will guarantee that spelling is retained perfectly.
  3. Phase 3: Learn the modern writing system.
    • Once a solid command of the written ancient language is achieved, double back and work on the written modern language using such courses as Assimil and Duolingo, along with reading children's books and news articles, which is my standard MO once I hit the intermediate level.
Fitness

I signed up for this year's Polyglot Fitness Challenge, with less than half of the year to go! My goal is to run at least a couple of times a week (plus some calisthenics). I've gone on three runs so far this summer. The second one was on the longer side, a bit over two miles. I had to run-walk it. I guess I can't just run for two miles straight anymore! I'll need to work my way back up to it. The most recent run (this morning) was shorter, about a mile, and this time I ran the whole way.

My current objective is to improve my form. My mantra is, if I'm doing everything right, nothing will hurt. I've been experiencing some pain in my right ankle after runs and I realized that I am probably pronating a bit. Sure enough, I kept looking down at my feet this last run and sure enough, it kept drifting to the right. I need to correct my muscle memory so that my foot stays straight. I also have a bit of wrist pain when I do pushups, so I'll need to find the right angle to minimize wrist movement.

Chess

I got back into chess today. We'll see if it keeps up! I had been trying out some new, less theoretical openings (Queen's Gambit as white, French and Queen's Gambit Declined as black), but even those were a bit onerous to master. So I'm going back to an earlier plan which is to learn the London as white (basically the most noob-friendly possible opening) and after that I'll learn a very compact black repertoire called "play 1... d6 Against Everything" which focuses on two very similar openings: the Modern Philidor vs. 1.e4 and the Old Indian vs. 1.d4. These two courses combined only have about 700 lines which I should be able to learn in a month or two, and then I'll be up and running playing games.
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Re: עברית 2022

Postby Deinonysus » Mon Jul 11, 2022 1:01 pm

עִבְרִית

I've only gone through a couple more Pimsleur lessons. Either I didn't get as far into volume 2 as I thought I did, or they did a complete overhaul of the course, but either way, it's mostly new material for me and I've needed to repeat the occasional lesson.

For Biblical Hebrew, I ended up skipping the substitution drills at the end of chapter 7. They're valuable but time consuming since they involve the short-term memorization of several long sentences. I had been stuck on them for about a week and I decided it was time to move on to the next chapter. Hopefully I should be done with chapters 8 and 9 soon so I can begin chapter 10. I'll have to start loading the vocabulary for chapter 11 into my Anki decks soon.

isiXhosa

I usually spend a bit of time on Xhosa once a year. Hopefully I can hold off this year and stay on task with Hebrew, but I will plan on finally ordering a copy of the Greater Dictionary of isiXhosa 3-volume set from the publisher in South Africa. Now that I've done one successful international wire I'm much less intimidated by it, assuming that it's necessary and they don't take credit cards. No course goes into depth on Xhosa tones, so the Greater Dictionary of isiXhosa is the only comprehensive source on lexical tone in Xhosa that I'm aware of. There are also grammatical tone changes which are covered in The Grammar of isiXhosa by JC Oosthuysen.

Chess

I haven't made a ton of progress because I've been into an old favorite game, Heroes of Might and Magic IV. I think I've started to get it out of my system and I'm hoping to finish the Quickstarter guide to my London course today. I've done 20 of the 30 lines so far. That will put me at almost 10% of the course completed.

Fitness

I've been keeping up my goal of running a couple of times a week. My family travelled last week so I had my longest break in running since starting the challenge, but I'll be able to pick it back up tomorrow. Up until the trip I had been running every other day.
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Re: עברית 2022

Postby Deinonysus » Sat Jul 16, 2022 4:46 pm

עִבְרִית

Pimsleur has gotten pretty hard. Most of the vocabulary is new now, so I find myself repeating lessons as often as not. Well, the course getting harder must mean I'm learning a lot more, fingers crossed!

For Biblical Hebrew, I went through most of chapter 8 and decided I got the gist. I was able to read the story at the end (the boy who cried wolf) without any trouble. Now there's just one chapter left to go before I'm learning new material!

I started entering the vocabulary from chapter 11 into Anki, and it's a doozy! This chapter introduces the second of Biblical Hebrew's two tenses, the imperfect (which eventually became the future tense in later Hebrew), so this doubles my amount of verb morphology. Luckily, my time studying some basic Arabic has paid off. Arabic's present tense has almost the exact same consonant patterns as Biblical Hebrew's imperfect, so it is not hard for me to learn this new tense. I just need to learn the non-consonental vowel patterns, which are different from Arabic.

I also started learning the Phoenician/Paleo-Hebrew script, which was used for Hebrew until the Babylonian exile, after which the Assyrian Aramaic forms of the letters were adopted, which are still used today. The Phoenician alphabet looks really cool, but there isn't much for me to do with them yet. When my Hebrew is a bit better I can try to read ancient stone inscriptions, but there's a lot of variation in the letter shapes so it seems tough. I do see some Paleo-Hebrew or Phoenician pop up on Reddit from time to time and I guess I just got frustrated not being able to read it and try to figure out what it says.

Ancient History

I've been watching the Great Courses series The Holy Land Revealed, which is helping with my Hebrew motivation. I'd also like to watch the series on Ancient Egypt, but I think I already hit the two-series-per-month cap on Kanopy, because I've also seen a couple episodes of Writing and Civilization, so it'll have to wait. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid getting sucked into Ancient Egyptian, but it's tempting.

Zulu

Just as my interest in Xhosa has perked up, Duolingo's new Zulu course seems like it should be coming out immanently, although I'm not holding my breath (it's been coming out "today" for at least a week). I've spent a little bit of time on Xhosa which is mutually intelligible with Zulu, so I'm interested in seeing how big the differences are. I ordered Colloquial Zulu as well. Hopefully I'll be able to spend a bit of time on Zulu without killing my Hebrew momentum.
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Re: עברית 2022

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Jul 17, 2022 7:21 pm

עִבְרִית

I managed to clear out my new chapter 11 vocab with the imperfect in Anki. It wasn't too bad. Again, I remember the consonant patterns from Arabic so it was easy to remember. I put in the forms for three verbs (one plain, one ending in a pharyngeal, and the last ending in aleph), and I was going to add more of the examples from this chapter but they all follow the patterns of these first three, so I think I'll be fine.

Learning the Paleo-Hebrew script paid off quickly! I was watching The Holy Land Revealed and there was an image of an inscription at the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem that chronicled the construction of the new tunnel, attributed to King Hezekiah in preparation for a siege by the Assyrians. Anyway, the image was very faint and cracked but I was able to make out a few of the letters, including the word היה (meaning "he/it was"). Pretty cool!

Egyptian

I was able to watch the Great Courses series on Ancient Egypt after all. I don't think I'll be able to avoid at least getting a couple of books on Ancient Egyptian and leafing through them. I have my eyes on The Ancient Egyptian Language: An Historical Study and Ancient Egyptian Phonology, both by James P. Allen. The phonology book is important because I want to make my best effort at pronouncing the language properly with reconstructed vowels. The standard Egyptological pronunciation, with fake vowels inserted between butchered consonants, makes my skin crawl, so I'll be avoiding that at all costs!

Fitness

I finally broke down and bought one of those smartwatch thingies! I got tired of having no idea how fast I'm going, except for the one race I've run which was for one mile and I ran it in just under 10 minutes. So now I'll have a better idea of my pace.

I've been running about 2 km (1.3 miles) and I can run about half of it at a fast pace, slowing down to a leisurely jog intermittently. My next goal is to be able to run the entire distance without slowing down, and then I'll move up to a larger route, keep running that until I can do the whole thing without slowing down, etc.

I'm interested to see what my "fast" pace actually is. It's pretty cool, I hit my stride and I feel bouncy and my legs start to feel weightless. My body starts getting tired well before my legs do when I'm going at the right pace. Ironically, when I'm going slower my legs get tired more easily; it's like I'm manually picking my legs up and putting them down rather than just letting them do their thing. So I think I've figured out the concept of conserving energy using the elasticity of my leg tendons. A year or two ago after watching a video about running, I experimented with pushing way down with my legs to get a really big bounce pushing my legs forward, but I pushed way too hard and hurt my legs. I had to take a long break from running and my legs weren't feeling 100% for a while. But now I think I've figured it out. It isn't about pushing down and getting big bounces, it's about being light and effortless. I think my 10-minute mile pace was before I figured out the bounciness factor, so hopefully I'll be able to keep an even better pace once I get my endurance up.
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Re: עברית 2022

Postby Deinonysus » Thu Aug 04, 2022 2:35 pm

I've been taking a break from Hebrew for the past week or two. I got sucked into chess and that's taking up most of my leisure time. I decided to learn the quickest repertoires that I can, and then finally get some games in. Those repertoires are the Chessable courses The London Attack for white and 1...b6 Against Everything for black (Owen's/English defence... dubious but fun!). These two courses combined have less than 600 lines to memorize. I should be able to finish that in 2-4 months.

I realized that by only learning my own moves in a line, it's hard to actually use the line in a game because I'm not sure that I'm responding to the right moves that are covered in my repertoire. So I've decided that a line is not properly memorized until I can remember the opponent's next move before I play my own. It takes more time up front to memorize a line, but I don't need to review as much later on so it will probably even out, and I'll know exactly when my opponent puts me out of book rather than just playing my memorized sequence and hoping that it's right.

I also got sucked into my ridiculous conlang idea to make a polysynthetic language with such a massive phonemic inventory that a very complicated word can be expressed as just one syllable, with inflections done by changing things like a consonant's manner of articulation or a vowel's phonation, length, tone, and backness. I was interested in using Navajo's verbal system as a main inspiration (particularly it's aspect and subaspect system). However, it's so complicated that it made my head spin. I thought about spending some time on Navajo, but honestly it would take a big investment to get to the point where I understand the intricacies of the aspect system, not just a couple weeks or a month which is my usual annual time expenditure on Navajo. So I'm holding off for now.

My kid goes back to daycare in a couple of weeks, so I'll have some car time where I can restart Pimsleur. I think that will be a good time to get back into Hebrew, both biblical and modern.
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Re: עברית 2022

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Sep 09, 2022 5:10 pm

Haven't updated in a while. Not much to report but here goes.

עִבְרִית

I was off of Pimsleur for a while but now I'm back. I've been reviewing unit 2 and I'm much more confident with the material after taking a break and redoing it. I just finished lesson 10.

Making much less progress with Biblical Hebrew. I pecked at my Anki deck a bit and I think I've retained the vocabulary well, but I haven't had the motivation to do much studying. I've been focusing most of my attention on other hobbies (chess and stories; most recently, I've been watching the Marvel Defenders saga).

Egyptian

As I mentioned earlier, I've been interested in Ancient Egypt lately. My wife is into it too and we're going to see an exhibit on King Tut in a few weeks. I've gotten a few books on Egyptian: Ancient Egyptian Phonology and Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs by James Allen and Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction by Antonio Loprieno. I haven't gotten much further than flipping through them. Loprieno and Allen both have reconstructions of the pronunciation but neither book is that accessible without some knowledge of the grammar, so I'm planning to start in on the Middle Egyptian book and see what I can put together about the pronunciation.

I think it would be really cool to be able to go to the exhibit and pick out some words or sound out names from the inscription. Wiktionary gives the reconstructed pronunciation of Tutankhamun as /təˈwaːtəʔ ˈʕaːnəχ ʔaˈmaːnəʔ/. Transliterated into early Classical Hebrew (which can be done because all of the sounds in this name also existed in Classical Hebrew), that would be spelled:
תְוָתְא עָנְח אַמָנְא

Chess

I quickly abandoned the London and Owen's. The London is very well known at the beginner level so people will know how to deal with it, and neither opening is very good once people know how to counter them. So instead I went with the Modern Defense for black (The Uncompromising Modern Defense) and 1.Nf3 King's Indian Attack (Lifetime Repertoires: King's Indian Attack) for white, both from Chessable. They are both serious openings that are played at the top level and have very high winrates. And unlike the London, these openings are rarely played at the beginner and intermediate levels so I'm likely to know more theory than my opponents every game. So far I've completed the "Short & Sweet" preview for both courses (about 50 lines total). It will be about 700 lines total to finish the "important lines" for both courses, which is not much more theory than completing the London and Owen's courses. So far I've played a few games vs bots with my new repertoires and had good results. I'm not sure how soon I'll want to start playing against human opponents but maybe it's not that far off.

In the future I'd like to complement this hypermodern high risk, high reward repertoire with a super-solid repertoire of e4 and e5 mainlines with the Queen's Gambit Declined and Nimzo-Indian vs other openings as black, but it will be a while before adding a second repertoire gives me better returns than working on my endgames and other general housekeeping.

Fitness

Well... I stopped running some time during the summer and didn't get back into it. I would like to pick it back up, maybe next week.
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Re: עברית 2022

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Nov 27, 2022 1:06 pm

I got a new job, which is pretty exciting! It's my first job that uses Python in an official capacity so hopefully my coding skills will take a nice leap which will help me come up with better machine optimization scripts for making better keyboard layouts.

I've stalled out with Hebrew so I decided it's time to reassess my priorities. I've set some new goals:
  • Clear out my Biblical Hebrew Anki deck every day
  • Electronics off by 10 PM and work on Biblical Hebrew textbook
Pimsleur is going okay so I don't have any new goals with that. I'm on unit 2 lesson 20 but I keep getting disrupted. I suppose that's life with a kid. Maybe I should start doing Pimsleur while doing chores again. That was helpful to keep Pimsleur going every day and avoid getting derailed.

Biblingo has a black Friday deal so I'm thinking about signing up for a year's subscription. I forget exactly why I quit when I tried it out a couple of years ago. I think that a major reason was that typing Hebrew with vowels is uncomfortable because the standard layout is terrible. This will put pressure on me to finally create a new Hebrew layout. This will require a few things:
  • Machine optimize the layout. This will require me to learn the DEAP library for genetic algorithms in Python.
  • Figure out how to automagically replace letters with their final forms when appropriate. In many scripts (such as Arabic and Devanagari), the font actually handles the different letter forms in different contexts, but Hebrew and Greek leave that up to the typist unfortunately. If I can figure out a way to do this automatically, that will free up five keys to better support Yiddish and pointed Hebrew. I think the best way to do this is to create a windows service, which can be done with the pythoncom library.
  • Get monogram, bigram, and trigram frequencies for unpointed Modern Hebrew and Yiddish (using Wikipedia as a corpus) and pointed Biblical Hebrew (using, duh, the Bible as a corpus). This will require me to learn how to parse Wikipedia dumps.
There are a lot of big tasks here, but hopefully I can break it down into smaller, manageable tasks.

I'm envisioning a layout that has the plain Hebrew alphabet in the best spots with the five final letter keys replaced with some extra letters to support Yiddish. But when you press capslock, the Yiddish characters (and maybe also the number row) will go away and be replaced with letters that are ideal for writing pointed Hebrew, for example with easily accessible vowel marks and the dagesh version of each letter available with the shift key.
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Re: עִבְרִית לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Jan 01, 2023 10:41 pm

This log's original title was עברית 2022, with the conceit that my Modern Hebrew resources should take me about a year to get through. That didn't happen. I switched my focus from "let's just get Modern Hebrew over with" back to my preferred scheme of combining spoken Hebrew with Pimsleur with Biblical Hebrew using my pseudo-reconstructed pronunciation to help remember spelling. That's been going slowly but steadily. I'm close to the end of Pimsleur unit 2 and I've mastered the imperfect tense for several common verbs. I haven't yet started reading through the simplified book of Ruth, although I've learned enough vocabulary to.

Rather than starting a new log עברית 2023, I've renamed this log עִבְרִית לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד‎ 3ibrīt l:3ōlām wā3ɛd meaning Hebrew forever and ever, because it's starting to seem that I'll never be finished with Hebrew, despite my excessive plans to study seemingly every language in the world.

My plans are changing pretty significantly for 2023. I'm starting an intermediate-level class in Modern Hebrew which will take up the bulk of my study time. We're starting about half way into a textbook, so I'm trying to go through the earlier chapters and learn all the vocabulary that I don't know, so I'm building up an Anki deck and trying to cram as much as I can.

As much as I'd love to keep going with Biblical Hebrew, I'll probably have to mainly stick with Modern Hebrew this year. I'm thinking of restarting Assimil Hebrew in place of my Biblical Hebrew text. We'll see how it goes.
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Re: עִבְרִית לְעוֹלָם וָעֶד

Postby Deinonysus » Fri Jan 06, 2023 9:07 pm

עברית

I had my first class today and it went really well! The teacher likes to keep the English to a minimum which is great. I was able to understand almost everything she said and I was able to say a lot in Hebrew. I didn't need to switch to English that often. So that was a great confidence booster! I guess those 800 times trying to go through Pimsleur Hebrew but only getting through Unit 1 paid off! I'm now confident in calling my level of Hebrew intermediate.

I had initially emailed the teacher asking if I should be moved to the beginner class because there's a lot of vocabulary and a good amount of grammar in the textbook that I didn't know, but it turned out that I am the most confident speaker in the class, I just need to make up the unknown vocabulary from earlier in the book which would take me a couple weeks to a couple months.

I was trying to hang on to Biblical Hebrew which is fun, interesting, and dear to my heart, but sadly I think I need to take advantage of these lessons with a native teacher and lean into Modern Hebrew, so I'm going to start a multi-track blitz, adding Assimil and Duolingo to Pimsleur which I've already been working on. I'll be starting the third and final unit of Pimsleur within the next week or two so I'll need to figure out what to do once I've finished it. I'll either drop the commute learning time slot, or I'll try to start FSI Hebrew. I'm not sure that I'll be able to do FSI as audio only; I'll probably have to drop Duolingo to accomodate it into my schedule because I'll need to learn vocabulary and probably memorize the dialogs, but I'm fine with that.

My goal by the end of the year is to start moving away from speaking English with my parents unless circumstances demand it (conversation with non-Hebrew speakers).

Chess

With the extra time I'll be spending on Hebrew, I don't know how much I'll be able to stick with chess but I'm hoping to keep adding opening lines slowly but surely and reviewing known ones. I had stopped studying my openings for a while (the Modern and King's Indian Attack) but finished reviewing them and I've started learning new lines. I'm almost done with the quickstarter for the Modern.

Edit: Okay, I've already decided not to even bother with Duolingo. I'll do it someday to practice my typing. Instead I want to spend more time working on my handwriting. We have worksheets to do in class and I'll need to write on them by hand. I can type in Hebrew fine but I never learned to write well in cursive, which is the only script that is written on paper by adults. I got a couple of books and I've started in on them, so that's something I'll be working on.
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