zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

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zenmonkey
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Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Mon Dec 27, 2021 4:38 am

My daughter P. Just called out and asked “t’as mis de la crème?” - a reminder to put on a layer of ointment on my new tattoo. What does a tattoo have to do with language learning?
Well, this one was my first. Designed and executed by my daughter. And I thought I could distract myself with a few Persian lessons from Assimil. Ridiculous thoughts. First off, my other daughters video called to watch me suffer. They were in Versailles with their mother’s family, getting ready for dinner while we were working quietly in the morning in California. Getting my leg done with almost 20 people popping in was not the zen learning moment I expected.

That only lasted a few moments, we stopped all that external noise and focused on moment. But clearly the buzz of the tattoo gun and the pain did not allow for much Persian to enter my mind.
I think I only learned “ The man gave water to the boy”.

62BFEF81-88D2-4646-A19C-8720D914EE26.jpeg
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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Jan 02, 2022 7:58 am

Happy New Year!

We’ve had a day with my father, my brother and his family. In between food and relaxing I’ve gotten off to a good start with Persian. I’m currently focusing on the first wave of ASSIMIL. And I’m using Anki for these early words. But I think I’ll need a grammar book soon. I ordered the older TYB manual based on input here and I’m looking forward to getting that in the next few weeks.

ASSIMIL lesson 5
Vocabulary - 10 words.

[tags: #tagLangPersian]
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zenmonkey
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Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Jan 02, 2022 11:19 pm

I’m not going to be posting every day but two topics are worth noting.

1) If I’m actually going to be learning Persian I really need to commit to 9 hrs a week, to be effective in my learning.

2) A great free resource comes from the University of Texas at Austin. https://www.laits.utexas.edu/persian_teaching_resources/

[tags: #tagLangPersian]
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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jan 05, 2022 7:13 am

[German]
Decided to do a few cards with Anki on my German vocabulary. Whelp. Out of 60 cards I knew maybe two. This is my deck on 1000 advanced frequency words. So I have some work to do here. I think I’ll go slowly and actually look these words up rather in Leo than just try to memorize a meaning. Again. Extra muhe.

[French]
Studying Persian with Assimil has me working in French. But I’m translating everything back to English when I create Anki cards.
There is some ambiguity there, for example, the text translates در as “à” and I wrote this to mean “to” but it could be “at” or “in” in English. Maybe I should just study Persian in French for now. I need to think about it.

[Persian]
Going nicely, Assimil lesson 9. And I’ve wasted a gazillion minutes looking for additional material. The FSI recordings seem to only exist for the first 12 units. I did find an amazing old grammar book. Here is a snippet.

2DAC77DC-C1EB-4A23-AAC9-F0A481E9E83C.jpeg


which I’m going to enjoy reading while I work on this language. If I can complete 100 straight days I’m going to buy myself an early edition.

[Portuguese]
A little Anki, but the real success was dinner. My brother invited us to a Brazilian steakhouse in town (I’m in the Santa Cruz mountains for the next 3-4 months) and we had enough wine to chat in Portuguese with the waiters. My brother and father are pretty fluent, I’m the slug here but still kept up. Lots of Spanish of course. Always the struggle.

And I was able to tell my father “son takes father to house” in Persian - more or less.
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Last edited by zenmonkey on Thu Jan 13, 2022 4:23 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Herodotean » Wed Jan 05, 2022 1:16 pm

Good going on Persian!

zenmonkey wrote:[Persian]
Going nicely, Assimil lesson 9. And I’ve wasted a gazillion minutes looking for additional material. The FSI recordings seem to only exist for the first 12 units. I did find an amazing old grammar book. [snip] which I’m going to enjoy reading while I work on this language. If I can complete 100 straight days I’m going to buy myself an early edition.

That looks like the grammar written by Sir William Jones:
Jones is known today for making and propagating the observation about relationships between the Indo-European languages. In his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society (1786) he suggested that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin languages had a common root, and that indeed they may all be further related, in turn, to Gothic and the Celtic languages, as well as to Persian.
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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Wed Jan 05, 2022 5:43 pm

That looks like the grammar written by Sir William Jones:
Jones is known today for making and propagating the observation about relationships between the Indo-European languages. In his Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society (1786) he suggested that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin languages had a common root, and that indeed they may all be further related, in turn, to Gothic and the Celtic languages, as well as to Persian.


Thanks!
Yes, correct, that is the Jones grammar - it's available digitally and a pleasure to read.
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zenmonkey
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Jan 07, 2022 12:45 am

Right now the forum is rather difficult to use with the 502/503 errors and the (related) frequent need to re-log on.
But by gosh, this place is an amazing resource.

Shimaore
I definitely could spend my day reading peoples' posts and all the back content! Just constantly amazed by the great resources and learnings that people post here. Alas, my time is limited and while I spend it here, I'm not learning a language.

But the last few days, I've read up on Jorkens, Language Reactor, Tatoeba as I thought a little about frequency lists and a sentence method for rare languages. That got me programming a little and getting my rusty Python skills back up. But I'm going to stop that for now - I think I'm going to go old school and just work off a good old google sheet/word document. I learned this from a 70-year-old German lady that teaches immigrants. Stop futzing about and just give the content to someone to get it translated. That's good enough for phase 1.

Maybe a database? No database! (Maybe?!)

Anyway, the idea is to just create a simple document for a phrasebook - and get that translated for Shimaore by someone in Mayotte.

Resources for Shimaore are really limited, such as:

- https://www.evaneos.fr/mayotte/voyage/v ... de-survie/
- https://freelang-com.freelang.net/dicti ... imaore.php
- http://ylangue.free.fr

Phase 1 - Just write a simple, structured thematic phrase and vocab book that can be translated. Admit that it will be imperfect and incomplete. Rest pragmantic.

Persian
Did my time, continuing with Anki and ASSIMIL. The Jones grammar, as interesting and fascinating as it is, is not really that useful at this stage. I'll continue to read through it but a lot is just skimming. I need to figure out my resources. I plan to spend more time on the U of T - Austin material this weekend.

This is the honeymoon period!

من فارسی یک کمی بلدم
Last edited by zenmonkey on Fri Jan 21, 2022 6:27 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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zenmonkey
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Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Sun Jan 09, 2022 10:10 pm

[Persian]

Based on the notes from various members, I bought an inexpensive used copy of the earlier Teach Yourself Books - Modern Persian by John Mace. I agree, this is, in my first readings, an excellent step-by-step beginner book. My "hoard" for now is

- Assimil - Le Persan,
- TYB - Modern Persian,
- Pimsleur,
- FSI Spoken Persian,
- Persian of Iran Today - An Introductory Course,
- Jones Grammar of Persian,
- The University of Texas at. Austin course
and a Memrise course.

This is clearly more than enough material for now. However, I have a grammar book coming and I'm keeping my eye out for the Routledge - Basic Persian: A Grammar and Workbook".

I'll primarily be using ASSIMIL and TYB for now, with some incursions into one of the grammar books. I'm just using the Assimil first wave method listening to the recordings many times, Anki for vocabulary and the YTB for the lessons and exercises. So mostly very listening, reading and vocab. Not really speaking except for repeating exercises. I expect that will start later with more advanced Assimil lessons and Pimsleur shadowing.

I need to remember that Anki isn't the objective but just a method and stick to the other work too. It's just so easy to be satisfied with completing the day's cards!

Assimil - Lesson 13 - redo 11 before review 14.
TYB - Lesson 1
Anki - Learning 88 cards

[tags: #tagLangPersian]
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zenmonkey
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Some knowledge of Italian, Portuguese, Ladino, Yiddish ...
Want to tackle Tzotzil, Nahuatl
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby zenmonkey » Thu Jan 13, 2022 7:01 am

My youngest daughter (17) and I had a brief WhatsApp chat today.
I let her know that her cousin was learning Korean (she’s 10) because of K-pop; my daughter had a brief interest in Korean soaps. And I was suggesting they connect on the topic.
She wrote back that she was going to drop Korean because she thinks she can’t learn two new languages seriously. She’s going to focus on Russian for now. We chatted about her Duolingo streak (we had a challenge going, I’m losing).

So let’s see where that goes. :)
But this is sweet to see her caught up in the love of learning languages.

[Persian]

It’s been 15 days of daily Persian and I’m definitely more in love with the language. The SOV structure, the suffix pronouns… And the discovery of some of the nuances of the script. Certainly a lot of fun. My days begin with Anki.

Now all I need is to balance this with my business work.

Assimil - Lesson 15
TYB - Lesson 2
Anki - Learning 120 cards

[tags: #tagLangPersian]
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Re: zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

Postby Beli Tsar » Thu Jan 13, 2022 12:03 pm

zenmonkey wrote:I'm keeping my eye out for the Routledge - Basic Persian: A Grammar and Workbook".

Although I didn't finish this, it definitely seemed like a good book to me - clear and thorough, in comparison to a lot of other books out there. It was a bit hardcore for me initially, but once you've been through Mace it shouldn't be too bad.
Best of luck!
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