Molweni! Studying isiXhosa

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Deinonysus
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Re: Molweni! Studying isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Wed Jun 02, 2021 10:39 am

isiXhosa

Due to the unfamiliarity of the format of the courses I'm using, I've had a hard time settling into a daily routine, which is the most important thing to make long-term progress. I've been making the best progress with the Ubuntu bridge course because when I'm in the car, what else am I going to do? I've been repeating the vocabulary out loud over and over until I have it memorized. I'm still on lesson 2 but progress is steady. Lesson 1 was a big help in having my first Xhosa conversation during my trial lesson on Italki.

Getting my hands on a set of the Greater Dictionary of isiXhosa has been an ordeal. I found an educational website that seemed to have them in stock and ships to the US (for more than the cost of a whole volume!), but I had to sign up for a slightly sketchy money transfer site to make the purchase, and the purchase had been repeatedly failing. I tried contacting the site multiple times but I have gotten no response.

Out of desperation I tried contacting the publisher and to my surprise, they responded the very next day and will be able to refer me to their courier and ship a new set to me in a couple of months, pending a reprint! With my luck the courier will be the very site I've been struggling with, but we'll see how it goes.

I think I'll skip to the grammar section of the cultural grammar, which makes up the second half of the book. The cultural information is fascinating but the memorization is a bit of a slog and I'm keen to learn more grammar. They cover the noun classes over a couple of chapters and their coverage is by far the best I've ever seen, going into detail about what kinds of things are likely to be in each class.

Grammarians have a bizarre tenancy to group plural forms as completely separate noun classes, which makes no sense to me. By that count, Xhosa had sixteen noun classes, but that's like saying that French and German each have four classes (respectively: masculine, feminine, masculine plural, and feminine plural; and masculine, feminine, neuter, and plural). This book quite sensibly uses an older system of nine classes where the plurals are not separate.

Chess

I've been working more on memorizing openings, and at the moment I'm about halfway done learning all the traditional Philidor lines in Wesley So's course. At the top level, only the Pirc Philidor is played, so there are only 18 lines of the traditional Philidor, including Morphy's opera game which I have already memorized. It's probably the most bang for my buck of any opening in this course, because it's actually the second most popular follow-up to 1.e4 e5 2.Nf6 at the intermediate level, ahead of the Petroff!

I'll work on the Italian next. There are actually only a few hundred lines to memorize, just a fraction of the massive course. Considering that the Italian is by far the most popular opening at the beginner level, it will be a very economical investment.

There is no course on Chessable that comprehensively addresses the McConnell (aka Greco) defense, which is dubious but surprisingly popular at the intermediate level. It goes 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Qf6?. I've been using the free Stockfish analysis on Lichess' analysis board, combined with their free database of games, filtered for a 1600 rating, to create my own private Chessable course that will cover every McConnell position that has occurred in 100 or more games. I estimate it will be about 50 lines to memorize but they will all be short, under 10 moves, and they all end with a fairly crushing position so I should have an easy time with any game where I see this defense.
7 x
/daɪ.nə.ˈnaɪ.səs/

User avatar
Deinonysus
Brown Belt
Posts: 1216
Joined: Tue Sep 13, 2016 6:06 pm
Location: MA, USA
Languages:  
• Native: English
• Advanced: French
• Intermediate: German,
   Spanish, Hebrew
• Beginner: Italian,
   Arabic
x 4620

Re: Molweni! Studying isiXhosa

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Jun 13, 2021 1:57 am

Well, I haven't updated in a while so there's a lot to unpack.

I finally went all the way through lesson one of Speak Xhosa With Us and I really liked it. It's from 1998 so I was pretty shocked that it worked with almost no problem on my Windows 10 computer. The one issue was that the videos wouldn't play due to an ancient codec. They were available in a folder and I could play them outside of the program with VLC player but that was really obnoxious so I didn't bother much. I ended up finding a regedit script to reenable the codec and I was able to start seeing the video inside of the program. Unfortunately some of the videos started freezing, but I could at least see the thumbnail and hear the audio. This program is in the style of a really old school grammar. It asks you to essentially skip to the reference section and memorize a few charts, and then come back and do the exercises. It's pretty hardcore and takes a lot of effort but in a lot of ways I prefer it to slower but less thought-intensive methods.

I had another lesson and my teacher said that my pronunciation of the clicks had improved in the intervening week. I'd been walking around the house practicing them a lot. Unfortunately, it's almost summer vacation and I won't have the house to myself during the week for much longer, so I think it's time to switch languages again. I could fit in one more week of practice and another lesson but since the end is in sight I'm a bit checked out. I'll keep working on getting my hands on that Xhosa dictionary set and hopefully I'll have it on hand the next time I work on Xhosa, possibly in the spring. I have a tentative plan to work on spoken Hebrew in the car using Pimsleur and then FSI and use my other time slots to study Xhosa. I had previously been putting off studying Hebrew until after learning Arabic; since Arabic preserves all of the consonant distinctions that have merged in Modern Hebrew, so that would help me a lot with Hebrew's obnoxious difficult spelling. But a less elegant solution of course is to learn the spoken language first and the spelling of words at a later date. That would allow me to speak with my parents in Hebrew with maximum efficiency while removing the urgency to learn Arabic and Biblical Hebrew before Modern Hebrew.

Not only is Xhosa out for the summer, but it also doesn't make sense to study a language that I would use Pimsleur for (such as Hebrew, Arabic, or Russian), since I will have no commute. That leaves me with a lot of good options, including French, German, Inuktitut, or Navajo. But I think I have decided on Ancient Greek. I have previously studied a little bit of Homeric Greek, but I do also have a copy of Assimil's Ancient Greek (Attic). Now, it's probably a mistake to try to learn Attic and Homeric Greek at the same time, but maybe I won't get too confused if I focus on passive skills only in Attic Greek but productive skills in Homeric Greek (using Homeric Greek by Clyde Pharr). I'll see how it works.
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/daɪ.nə.ˈnaɪ.səs/


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