zenmonkey's multilingual adventures of a traveller

[neuroascetic]

I got the German trainer along with the $3 English IPA deck. I think both combine together pretty well, but you can get a lot out of just watching the youtube video that accompanies both decks, which, I believe, are pretty easy to find.

[zenmonkey]

Interesting video of Ladino.



My understanding is about 95%+ She speaks very clearly.

[zenmonkey]

After several weeks of other stuff, travel, a heavy work load and three days of flu - I've been trying to get back to my schedule on Hebrew and Tibetan. Classes are scheduled and all that but alas tonight my class did not go as planned.

Internet issues with Skype basically made it impossible to have my class. Which is sort of a relief since I was a bit embarrassed about how little I studied over the New Year's. But I guess a bit of consolidation occurred during this pause - I found that my sentence recall (Anki / Memrise) was pretty good.

I did purchase one or two things from Wyner. I'm currently using the Hebrew Word List and there are things I like and things I find poorly done.

Pro

• list comes with excellent sound files
• good division and grouping of words
• well explained use
• good for A1/A0 vocab
• while not good for sentences, the grouped words are smartly grouped together and one can build simple chunks like "white star" or "young dogs in park"
• notes are included

Con

• it's a pdf and the copy and paste into Anki is a pain in the butt
• It took me a good 45 minutes to restructure my anki cards to include what I now needed, had to rethink this as it wasn't really that well explained in his book or site
• the idea of creating sentences from the google simple search no longer works, his solution for building sentences from the old search doesn't really give great results for Hebrew - so not great as a sentence generator
• The Hebrew words used are written with niqqudim (vowel markers) - if you want to learn standard writing you need to remove them.

So overall, a useful list - now that I've got my method in place, it takes me about a 30 secs to make a good (but not great) card - English, Hebrew, Image, Sound, API, translit. and cursive text. I'll see if I can do the 625 words in 1-2 months (about 1500 cards?).

[neuroascetic]

Con

• it's a pdf and the copy and paste into Anki is a pain in the butt
• It took me a good 45 minutes to restructure my anki cards to include what I now needed, had to rethink this as it wasn't really that well explained in his book or site

There is definitely a gap in his book in explaining how to combine his 625 word list with Anki. I wish that he would provide an incomplete Anki deck with the word, ipa, translation, and sound fields filled out, then you provide personally meaningful context sentences and images. The images in the pdf should be available as separate files as well. I don't think sounds were included when I got mine, so that's a nice addition.

[zenmonkey]

Today I had a call with a start-up in Korea. My business incubator asked me to check if my team would be interested in what they are developing and their business model - if we decide to sponsor them into our incubator one of the resulting value would be the collaboration with 'internal' teams in product development, marketing, etc...

Why am I writing about this? Well, about half of the call was in Korean. And it was pretty bad because we had a terrible translator on-line. I'd ask a question - the Korean lead understood what I was asking and would give a long and precise answer and the translator would give back a one sentence answer. "They don't need to do that," "They though about the medical thing," "They will do that in October." (He had said August).

It was a frustrating call. But I like what this group is doing, they answered enough of my questions right that I am going to give mostly positive feedback.

I'm wondering how much of my positive attitude is just the excitement of trying to work with a group where we are going to have to work hard to communicate verbally! This is sooo rare in my field - having an English speaker on a team is pretty ubiquitous - only some rare and innovative start-ups are fully non-English but it is good to see this emerging more and more around the world.

And no, I'm not going to learn Korean. No. NO.

Yesterday, I went to Strasbourg to have a day with my oldest - A museum visit in Colmar to see the Unterlinden Museum. It was amazing - works from Pablo Picasso, Jean Dubuffet, Fernand Léger, Serge Poliakoff, Georges Rouault, Pierre Bonnard, Robert Delaunay, Otto Dix, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and others... I'll post a picture to this log later. But the highlight for me was a discussion with my daughter on Copic, Sumarian, Assyrian and Ugaritic. She's going to send me the Copic material (it's all electronic) and she's currently mostly focusing on Sumarian/Ugaritic this semester while she's going to try to keep her Akkadian reading semi-active.

My ears perked up when she mentioned that Ugaritic also had an alphabet and that abecedaria (lists of letters in order) had also been found. Cool! Looks like I might have a quick project for an app for learning the Ugaritic alphabet. woo!

[Ani]

You are so going to learn Korean....

[zenmonkey]

I’m in the Philippines for the next 10 days and linguistically it’s such an odd and rich country. Everyone seems to speak some English but you never hear it as everyone speaks their primary language. Yet so much of the signage and advertising is purely in English. Interesting and sort of psychotic.

And today’s finds.

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3B3B9EB3-5FD3-47CF-89AF-F433706C12F8.jpeg

014680C7-17C8-4174-A116-A0511633B011.jpeg

[sfuqua]

The Philippines is full of absolutely massive language switching.
TV for entertainment is mostly in Tagalog, but one of the common things people do is to switch to English in dramatic moments.
Like most places with a couple of languages, there is a whole other level of culture that takes place only in the local languages, but people who don't know English are definitely considered to be lower class.

[zenmonkey]

Back from the polyglot gathering with lots of new material and motivation. I'm not going to do a review, because that would take too much time, but in short I had a great time, enjoyed new and old friends, learned some useful things and got my head filled with new ideas.

My daughter also had a great time.

My presentation went well (I think), and it is available on http://alphabetsnow.zyntx.com/blog/poly ... ring-2018/

Now to continue to buckle down on Hebrew and Tibetan... (and stuff...)

[zenmonkey]

Ok, rdearman's summary in his log covers the event rather well, so I'm going to go the Way of the Lazy Fist and leave it at that. The comment I'll add is on the emotional spectrum - I found the event to be friendlier and more relaxed since I already had an idea what to expect and I already knew some people. I missed some of the absent people - both from and off the forum - the few faces I was really expecting to see but that didn't make it left me wistful from what felt like unfinished conversations. I hope they'll be there next year.

Being a speaker also significantly changed some of the interactions - people reached out and I had additional contacts that were just very warm.

I was however particularly disappointed to see some great but timid polyglots get ignored at lunch/dinner time and find themselves eating alone. I think we had the pleasure to be able to reach out to them and hear some good stories.

And noticeably I felt that the event was even more comfortably engaged towards diversity. Whatever flavour people came in, it was just warming to see the human melange.

And of course, I not only enjoyed learning about new languages but will need to read up on Romanian, Norwegian, Slovak, Wolof, Setswana (more on that later) before next year. On top of my usual German/Hebrew/Tibetan work set. I think I'm learning to identify the languages I want to focus with some serious longer term commitment and those that are, from the start, just short escapades.

---

Yesterday, I listened to the entire 23 courses from the Setswana Peace Corps material. This was just to get an initial taste of the sounds and begin to think about how I'm going to address this language. Tonal, relatively low cognate level (but some borrowed constructs from English...), a few clicks, different grammar rules... but at least it uses the Roman alphabet.

So first goals - review phonology, see if rdearman's Anki decks can be tagged for me to focus on tonal pairs and phonology at first. Start to identify a few phrases to begin working on. And read the Kauderwelsch first chapters & skim the Peace Corps Grammar book.

I have a long flight on Monday to California, that should be ideal. If I don't spend the time sleeping. So tired.