Ketutar and languages

[aaleks]

Is my text in Bulgarian and not Russian?

I don't know about Bulgarian but it's definitely not Russian.

[Ketutar]

I decided it was Bulgarian, and gave up, and ordered the book in English...
And then I moped a little and did other things, and found Snuff in Russian, and this time it is Russian.
And the experience is quite different.
I was starting to despair

Any way, translating Bulgarian one believes to be Russian is aking to translating Maltese... almost every word is a fight. I can take it in Maltese, which is a REALLY small language, but not with Russian.

[reineke]

I am not sure I can follow this discussion even in English. The sentence translates "especially when drunk" and Google recognized it immediately as Bulgarian. C, ca is an important preposition which is probably confusing, but here it seems to mean "are". So, "especially when you are drunk" . I have 0 experience with Bulgarian.

[Iversen]

Нак Мак Фийгъл са най-опасната от всички феерични раси

Rule of thumb: when ъ is used as a wowel (or half-wowel) then it is almost certainly Bulgarian

Anything starting with "вси.." is likely to mean something like 'all', and "най-" means "the most" in just about all other Slavic languages apart from including Russian (OK, "nej" in Czech", but it's the same word).

And -та is the postclitic definite article, which Bulgarian uses with even more fervour than the Swedes use the Swedish one - even on adjectives, when they stand before their substantives. Macedonian also has such articles (and actually a triple set: here, there and yonder) - unlike the rest of Slavic languages, which seem poised to prove that you can live happily without articles.

"Опасен" means dangerous ... did Google Translate really propose 'drunk'??

[neofight78]

... and "най-" means "the most" in just about all other Slavic languages apart from Russian (OK, "nej" in Czech", but it's the same word).

Russian does have this prefix too, наивысший (the highest) and наилучший (the best) for example.

[Ketutar]

did Google Translate really propose 'drunk'??

пияни - drunkard

Thank you so much for all that information, that's exactly why I love languages

[Ketutar]

ca is an important preposition which is probably confusing, but here it seems to mean "are"

Wiktionary says in Bulgarian ca is "third-person plural present indicative form of съм", so in Bulgarian it actually is a verb. Interesting, that. So close, but so different

[Ketutar]

Half a year later...

So - it was my birthday, and again I started thinking about goals and what to do with my life and all that, and I would really be able to understand 50 languages when I'm 50. (Not going to happen, it's less than 1 year from now). So - here I am.

I have accepted that I will never be a very good language learner. Three weeks every January, April, and August isn't going to make anyone learn much. I don't like it, but I am a hare, not a tortoise. (Which is a really funny word.)
I have also accepted that I'm actually an awful language learner
I don't think my Finnish-isms is a problem, on the contrary, I like twisting languages into Finnish form. And it's an awful thing to do. Absolutely ghastly. Disrespectful and not at all appreciative of the other languages.
Also, I am not using my resources. There are at least 10 languages around me, people I could be interacting with and practicing my languages, but I don't do anything. Waste of resources. *sigh* Bad me.

So - This last week I have been studying some more Maltese. I finally decided to actually learn the verb conjugation. It just is too hard to try to figure out what a word might mean and what is indicative of the verb. And, sure, I feel stupid for not having done that earlier.

I have been studying a little Russian. A little. Very little. Like just reading.

I learned about Láadan. Sounds fascinating.
I also learned about Toki Pona.
And then I read someone's comment where he mentioned Tigerian. Wow! I love tigers! I got really excited when I first heard there's a language called Tigrinya

They also have some courses in Vulcan at Memrise

Conlangs are fun, but... it feels bad to know there are some hundred languages dying at the moment, because no-one speaks them, and then we create new languages with no real world view and thinking attached, and people learn them just because it's a fad. Like at Duolingo one can learn High Valyrian at the moment. There is no course for Arabic or Finnish, but there is one for High Valyrian. *facepalm*

I wish authors would find an obscure, dying language and make it the language of their fictional world.
And go to the last speakers and let them invent new words for things like computers and so on. If there aren't any, that is. One could take the Icelandic words and just translate them.

Oh, and then I'm brushing up a lot of languages I have studied, but aren't as interesting and "fancy" as for example Welsh and Korean. Spanish, Italian, German... It would be wonderful if I got them as good as my English (which I know is not that good, but it's good enough. )

And I finally dared to take the step to study Chinese. Now, there my Finnish-ness comes as a problem. I am just not used to form sounds needed to create the Chinese words. One comfort here is that that's obviously a problem for many people, probably Europeans. We don't have languages that are that soft - at least to my knowledge.

Anyway, giving up the stress and enormously high expectations on myself, as I don't care if I learn anything or not anymore, feels really great.

[tarvos]

I'm not sure what softness you are referring to, but here's a trick I used to learn to make the Chinese sounds (these sounds are entirely lacking in Finnish - out of the sounds you need, you only have s and ts).

Chinese uses loads of palatalized sounds (made with the tongue against the top of your mouth). Some of these feature the tongue curling back a little, the others are produced much more forward (like in Swedish 'fors').

What you have to do is to check two things:

1) where is my tongue when I make this sound? For example, when you are pronouncing 是, shi, it's supposed to sound like a very thick curled back English sh. Stick your tongue to your palate and curl it back a little when you make it, and pronounce an s all the while.

2) Aspiration. Some Chinese sounds distinguish aspiration (NOT VOICING AS IN ENGLISH OR SWEDISH). Finnish barely has either, so I'm not taking that into account. Aspiration means that you pronounce a consonant with an initial puff of air, as you do in Swedish "kong" or English " king". Practicing aspirated and non-aspirated consonants is key to Mandarin. If you want to be sure whether you're doing it right, you can put a piece of paper in front of your mouth while pronouncing the sounds, and check if the paper moves. It's supposed to move for aspirated consonants, and be still for unaspirated ones.

In Chinese, aspiration is important for the initials k,p,t,ch,c,q (as opposed to g,b,d,zh,z,j). Sh and x don't have aspiration as far as I remember, nor a counterpart, neither does s.

All the others are not aspirated (m,n,l,r,h). Please remind me if I've forgotten an initial.

[Ketutar]

I'm not sure what softness you are referring to, but here's a trick I used to learn to make the Chinese sounds (these sounds are entirely lacking in Finnish - out of the sounds you need, you only have s and ts).

Chinese uses loads of palatalized sounds (made with the tongue against the top of your mouth). Some of these feature the tongue curling back a little, the others are produced much more forward (like in Swedish 'fors').

What you have to do is to check two things:

1) where is my tongue when I make this sound? For example, when you are pronouncing 是, shi, it's supposed to sound like a very thick curled back English sh. Stick your tongue to your palate and curl it back a little when you make it, and pronounce an s all the while.

Yes, that's the softness. And thank you, it really works!

I am not a friend of the Swedish sh-sounds either X-] Sju sjösjuka sjuksysterskor som sjunker ner i en fors får gärna drunkna för min del. But I appreciate enormously your effort to find examples in languages I speak! Wonderful! Thank you