A language learners’ forum

Hi there!
Here are my languages:

Japanese
I have been acquiring this for years already, albeit in a very on-off manner. I'm starting to be able to read more technical articles, with the help of a trusty dictionary, looking up every other word .

Bulgarian
I don't know anything about this language. Net, nada. I have some prior exposure to other Slavic languages, however that caps out at maybe 20 words..

I might talk about my motivation later, for now I want to keep this log short and focused. One log that has greatly motivated me in the past was "Korean In Kuwait" by Goldfiber.

That's it for now I guess.
-- overscore

My first time looking at Bulgarian. I have no idea what I'm looking at, but I'm going to use methods that I found helpful when learning German.
Going through the Wikipedia Уикипедия article Библиофилия. There's a few things I note: "или, и, на" I know already.
"разговорното" seems to be similar to razgavarit'.. So I don't know much Russian at all, but there seems to be similar prefix systems, same as with German 'ver-', 'be-' and so on.
Endings look pretty different from anything I've seen.
There's a 'ъ' thingy used in every other word. Not sure yet what qualities that vowel has.

I can understand this whole sentence: Поставяне на български като език на интерфейса и клавиатурата в Android.
installation? of bulgarian like language in interface (GUI) and keyboard (Tastatur) on Android


The next step would probably to start looking for a good web dictionary. I used dict.cc extensively in the past, but the BG section doesn't seem very extensive.
For now I don't exactly need it, I can just drill random top1000 words with a Google search/Anki combination, but eventually things are going to get confusing without one. IPA would also be a must at this point until I have an idea how the phonetic system works..


Japanese

Read some online news articles about topics I'm familiar with. For some reason I ended up reading about WWII in the last month so I took a word I know, '北朝鮮', plugged that into Google (ググる is a verb by the way) and found a bunch of related articles.
北朝鮮によるミサイル発射実験
Then from that I can mine words. In this case I should now know 発射 and 実験.

Ended up doing a bunch of these .. I got words like 軍国 and so on. Next I might revisit media about the 露日戦争 since I know absolutely nothing about that conflict.

I was watching a short segment on Aoshima, one of the so-called cat-islands in Japan and decided to transcribe the warning panel on the island.

お願い

インターネットやテレビで話題になって青島へ猫を見に来られる観光客がかなり増えております。
しかし、猫へ餌をあげすぎることで、お腹をこわしたり、餌をもどしたりする体調の悪い猫も多くなっています。また、島のいたる所でフンをすることから悪臭等も出始めておりますので、基本的に餌やりはご速慮ください。
なお、どうしても餌をあげたい人については、場所を取り決めましたので、その場所でお願いします。
島民も多くの観光客とのふれあいを心待ちにしておりますので、島内のルールやマナーを守って、楽しいひとときを過ごしていただければと思います。

「静かに見守ってほしいニャー」

青島　島民より

There's a lot of words I don't know in there (though not all), so my next goal is to be able to read the Aoshima sign.

overscore wrote:お願い

インターネットやテレビで話題になって青島へ猫を見に来られる観光客がかなり増えております。
しかし、猫へ餌をあげすぎることで、お腹をこわしたり、餌をもどしたりする体調の悪い猫も多くなっています。また、島のいたる所でフンをすることから悪臭等も出始めておりますので、基本的に餌やりはご遠慮ください。
なお、どうしても餌をあげたい人については、場所を取り決めましたので、その場所でお願いします。
島民も多くの観光客とのふれあいを心待ちにしておりますので、島内のルールやマナーを守って、楽しいひとときを過ごしていただければと思います。

「静かに見守ってほしいニャー」

青島　島民より

Though I obviously can't see the sign, I would assume this is what was actually written.

Yeah indeed, thanks! It took me 2 minutes squinting at these characters to spot the difference. lol

Eesti Keel

I started reading Colloquial Estonian. I'm having some difficulty with the vowel 'õ', my mind wants to equate it to 'ö'. Final consonants undergo devoicing??

Not sure how I should approach vocab. For now I'm drilling individual words in Anki.

- aitäh
- raamat
- sõna
- keel
- vene
- ei, jaa

overscore wrote:Final consonants undergo devoicing??

Considering that voicing is a marginal phenomenon in Estonian, it can be argued that all consonants are devoiced by default, and that the short stops (represented by the letters b, d and g) may optionally undergo voicing in mid-word (non-initial and non-final) positions. In those positions b, d and g are primarily distinguished from p, t and k through length rather than voicing - the former are short while the latter are long, with pp, tt and kk being overlong.

Ha, that's amazing. This is the first language I learn that requires the use of a metronome.

This will be a quick entry.

Japanese

I started going back to this one manga café in town and managed to finish 3 tomes of a series ホーリーランド. This was the first time I managed to get through manga, so that surprised me. So that's been 3 days of 2-3 hours of reading.
I'm not using too many resources, there's still so many words I can pick up by context alone for which I can figure out the reading by inferring and checking with the kotoeri input thing on the computer.
When there's gibberish I usually just jump over and totally ignore it.
Sometimes I get tired of seeing the same block of gibberish for 10+ pages and then I cave in and look up the words.

Right now it's like picking fruit; with this series comprehension is high enough that I'm not wasting my time. I tried looking at other books but the gibberish rate was higher and meh. will try to exhaust my motivation on this one first and see where goes.

I figure I lost years of effort by butting heads with RTK and giving up. In the end it doesn't even matter, I'm not paying any attention to individual characters and the books act as a super SRS thanks to Zipf's law.
Of couse I can't write jack crap with a pencil, but will it ever matter.

As an example, if I have to describe 'select' RTK-style out of the blue like a quiz, I would say "a bunch of squiggles with that L stroke thing", but upon seeing "選" the meaning and reading pop up without effort cause I've seen 言選り.


現させられましたこと : take that, people who think only Hungarian can have crazy long words with 9 different cases stuffed into it.

Japanese

I'm sitting here, wondering what the logic behind 青年 is. I did some digging and I'm kind of regretting it.
It involves ancient Chinese lore, 5 elements, dragons, well, you can read about it here:

https://japanese.stackexchange.com/a/48159

For a mnemonic I'll just take the idea that 日本語 doesn't care to differentiate blue and green, and in western culture getting your "green hat" means you're a newbie. Being a young adult is kind of an introductory phase to life, high school and college are a microcosm of society: everything is protected in bubble wrap and there's no sharp edges.

--

Reading a bit on the Mongol Empire. Total chaos and destruction. Intriguing, how what are now small inconsequential countries like Mongolia and Greece make up the bulk of history books and left huge marks on the present world.
The Mongol Empire apparently slaughtered about 5% of the world's population at the time, and about 8% of Asian men are genetically connected to Genghis Khan.

I figure I'm enjoying reading about history, the rise and fall of empires, the ebb and flow of power, economies and so on.
What's bugging me is, while Wikipedia is a great source, it doesn't make for a very pleasant experience after a while. Density of information is very high, perhaps I should be transitioning to more extensive expert material for those things.