Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
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Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Tue Apr 05, 2016 6:42 pm

What I learned yesterday using BliuBliu:
車 kuruma くるま  car
道 do どう road
道り dori どうり major road, highway
男の子 otoko no ko おとこのこ  boy
新  shin しん new
ブス busu ぶす bus
中学 chugaku junior high
中国 chugoku  China
北京  Beijing

Today: setting up Learning With Text, using it for a German Wikipedia article, poking about to get it to work nicely with Japanese, slightly less poking about with Arabic (fine apart from the fact copying and pasting slightly messed up a sentence or two). Got a message on Reddit with A2 level Arabic content links. Will drop as much Arabic and Japanese into LWT in the following days since it's end of month as far as my mobile ISP is concerned - and there's a lot of bandwidth left for this month.

Downsides: still no hearing aids. And my ears itch. Damn the acne!
Last edited by Zireael on Thu Apr 07, 2016 7:02 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
x 77

Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Wed Apr 06, 2016 6:29 pm

Reading Japanese news from NHK Easy in LWT. I'm having trouble with the dictionary setup in LWT, but otherwise it's simply brilliant! (There's so little in the update because I spent the whole Tuesday and half of today fiddling with the setups, dictionaries and with a German Wikipedia page :lol: )

中東 chuto ちゅとう Middle East
います iimasu be, exist
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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
x 77

Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Fri Apr 08, 2016 6:05 pm

Ears still itch. Hearing aids still lie unused. I'm still pissed. I will make an attempt to wear them tomorrow - hopefully the spots have grown smaller and will stop pressing on the earmold.
On the upside, I'm getting better at LWT. I decided to use it for Spanish, too. And I'm considering Russian.

In the meantime, I'm researching for a future Alternate History project. Since it is mostly about technology progressing, you can bet the articles have Japanese names in them (after all, the Japanese have 1 mln electric cars on the roads, and robots such as ASIMO)

未来 mirai みらい future
貴金属 kikinzoku ききんぞく precious metal
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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
x 77

Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Sat Apr 09, 2016 6:29 pm

Saturday. One acne spot is gone, meaning I can finally wear one of the aids! Yay for being able to communicate normally again!
Head hurts tho.

Mum convinced me to give LWT a try in Russian, so I imported a Wikipedia article on Need for Speed franchise. Loads of Russian words are similar enough to Polish, so by knowing the topic beforehand (I've been playing NFS since I was, I dunno, 11? Saw NFS III Hot Pursuit at a cousin's) I've gotten far enough to recognize some letters, such as д я ж й. з and у still give me trouble due to their resemblance to Latin letters. At least I stopped reading в as /b/ :lol:

Turns out Glosbe sometimes doesn't find a translation even when it ought to (for instance, all German nouns, since they are capitalized). But then GT, which is also hot-wired into LWT by default, comes to the rescue! Not that I'm praising GT, but it's fairly good for individual words. If I have doubts about its accuracy (which I sometimes have, especially for Arabic), I copy and paste into Aratools or another dictionary I trust (such as Jisho for Japanese). Unfortunately it's not possible to plug Aratools into LWT and I haven't managed to get Jisho to work even though others indicate they did.
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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
x 77

Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Mon Apr 11, 2016 2:57 pm

Watched a documentary on TV on Japanese animals, so let's have some related vocab:

表 saru さる monkey
The macaques. Just google Japanese macaques to see some awesome pics...
島  shima じま  island, territory
Iwo Jima.
表 omote おもて front,face
Iriomote - can someone tell me why 西 is read "irio" in this one? Some dialect thing?
谷 tani だに  valley

Also keep working slowly through the Russian text on NFS and through some Japanese NHK Easy stuff, including one on the Panama Papers leak.
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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
x 77

Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Thu Apr 14, 2016 5:27 pm

Yesterday I went to a special CC screening of Ghadi, a Lebanese film about a boy with Down's. I could understand bits and pieces of the original, Arabic, dialogue.

Does anyone know where to find Arabic captions?
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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
x 77

Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Sun Jul 17, 2016 1:26 pm

Apologies for going silent for a couple of months - I got another 6-month long traineeship, which means I was fairly busy for those several months. Now it's starting to ease up again. I have started making a new computer game, too, and just for fun I am considering placing it in a Japan-esque setting and using a couple of kanji here and there :P

Yesterday I went to a convention and people were playing, among others, a game named "Takenoko" (designed by a Frenchman). I immediately guessed it would have something to do with bamboo. And when I looked inside the leaflet, I was delighted to see I know all three characters presented inside - 竹の子 :D
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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
x 77

Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Wed Sep 28, 2016 2:19 pm

You can probably guess that the traineeship wound up eating my time again.

Today I watched Yamato (男たちの大和) and was delighted whenever the Japanese subtitles appeared (to mark progress of time) - I could read the dates! Not much more, alas, but it was still a huge boost to confidence.

Also in the ending credits, several characters I recognized seemed very common in names. 竹 (this one seemed to be by its lonesome A LOT), 川, 中, 風... I also spotted one 犬 and a 火
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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
x 77

Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Thu Oct 27, 2016 11:36 am

Traineeship still eating my time.

あぶない abunai dangerous
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Zireael
Orange Belt
Posts: 158
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 6:29 pm
Languages: Native: Polish
C2: English
B2: Spanish
Somewhere I don't know: German
Beginner: Arabic, Polish Sign Language
Wanderlusting: Japanese, Russian
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=815
x 77

Re: Arabic in bite-sized parts (now with doses of JP & RU)

Postby Zireael » Fri Feb 10, 2017 3:04 pm

I guess I'm عزيزتي to all my Arabic-speaking friends :P (I congratulated one on getting into a doctorate at Warsaw University).

Sarah, my Arabic tutor is still in Kenya, and the timezones hurt our chances to chat on FB.

Traineeship still eating my time :(
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