Ogrim's Krambu - a plethora of languages, mostly European, both old and new

[Arnaud]

I have just started on the novel Дом, в котором…

The book is almost 1000 pages long
It's on my reading list but I think I'm not quite ready for that kind of long torture
Have a nice read.

[MattNeilsen]

I'll be following your Arabic journey with interest. I'm learning Hebrew right now and finding reading right-to-left to be an interesting challenge, not to mention having to learn a new script.

[Ogrim]

I have just started on the novel Дом, в котором…

The book is almost 1000 pages long
It's on my reading list but I think I'm not quite ready for that kind of long torture
Have a nice read.

Thanks Arnaud. I know, it is huge, but I just take one page at a time. With any luck I may finish it before 2020 .

I'll be following your Arabic journey with interest. I'm learning Hebrew right now and finding reading right-to-left to be an interesting challenge, not to mention having to learn a new script.

Right-to-left is not that much of an issue for me, maybe because I am left-handed?

Arabic and Hebrew certainly have a number of common features, such as a script without vowel signs, a system of three-letter roots etc. This video from Langfocus explains the similarities and differences quite well:

[Maiwenn]

Arabic is back :)

Yay!! Glad to have you back. :)

Did you notice any Arabic influences when you were in Malta?

[Ogrim]

Arabic is back

Yay!! Glad to have you back.

Did you notice any Arabic influences when you were in Malta?

Thanks for your kind words.

MALTA

I thought I'd share a few impressions from my week in Malta. As to Maiwenn's question, no, you don't really notice much Arabic influence in Malta, unless of course you consider the language as such. The Arabs conquered and pillaged Malta in 827 and it was left almost uninhabited until around 1050 when Arabs from Sicily moved there, bringing with them their Siculo-Arabic dialect which evolved into the Maltese language. However the Arabic settlement was shortlived, as the Normans took the island in 1091, reinstating Christianity as the only religion.

I won't turn this into a history lesson, but I think it is important to mention that Malta was effectively ruled by the Order of Saint John (the Knights Hospitalier of Malta) from 1530 to 1798 (although as a vassal state of Sicily), then there was a brief period under French rule before Malta became a British Crown Colony in 1814 only to gain independence in 1964 and become a Republic in 1974. All this has given Malta its unique character.

We stayed in a rather touristy area on the North-East coast, about 30 minutes from Valetta. The capital is certainly worth a visit, the old town is dominated by 16th century buildings, mostly in a baroque style. Saint John's co-cathedral, called so because the "real" cathedral is located in the old capital Mdina, has some impressive decoration and houses paintings of Caravaggio.

Some images from Valetta:


Mdina, which used to be the capital until the medieval period, is also worth a visit. Confined within walls, the city has only 300 inhabitants, but the surrounding, more modern city of Rabat has a population of around 12.000. It is nice to stroll along the narrow streets, visit the cathedral and have a coffee or lunch at one of the small cafes which offer a great view over the valleys below.

We also went to the fishing village Marsaxlokk in the south-east. Every Sunday there is a huge street market in the harbour, and you can eat some seriously fresh fish in one of the many restaurants there.

If you go to Malta you should take a day-trip to Gozo. We went on one of the many tourist boats which offer trips there. We had a stop-over at Comino for a swim in the Blue Lagoon (it was August so packed with people, but the water is really crystal clear and great for snorkeling) and then a bus trip around Gozo. Our guide told us there are only three inhabitants on the island of Comino, all belonging to the same family. I wonder if they don't feel a bit lonely sometimes?

Regarding languages, you do hear Maltese spoken here and there, and some street signs etc. are in Maltese, but as English is the second official language, it is everywhere. In hotels and restaurants, most staff seemed to be from elsewhere, at our hotel there were Italians, Czechs, Slovaks, Spaniards and Hungarians working, and the taxi drivers we came across were from Sicily, so even if I had spoken Maltese I would not have had much use for it. I did not see a single menu in Maltese. So the language is certainly one of the most notable remnants of the British period, together with the fact that they drive on the left. The driving style is more Italian than British though, I sometimes felt I was on the set of Fast and Furious . By the way, there are also the very British red telephone booths and red letter boxes in Valetta, although I suspect they are mostly used by tourists as photographic motives.

Maltese would probably be easier to learn than Arabic, as it is written in Latin script, including vowels, and a significant part of the vocabulary is of Italian origin. The basic structures and base vocabulary are clearly Semitic however, I noticed that verb declinations and the use of object pronouns as suffixes work pretty much the same way as in Arabic. Still I rather focus on learning MSA at this stage, and if ever I get to a decent level then it could be fun to pick up a little bit more of Maltese.

All in all, Malta is certainly worth a visit, but ideally I would have preferred to go at another time of the year, when there are less tourists than is the case in August. May or September would probably be ideal.

[MattNeilsen]

Right-to-left is not that much of an issue for me, maybe because I am left-handed?

Arabic and Hebrew certainly have a number of common features, such as a script without vowel signs, a system of three-letter roots etc. This video from Langfocus explains the similarities and differences quite well:

[video]

That was an interesting video - thanks for sharing it. My fiance and (soon-to-be) father-in-law have both wanted to learn Arabic for several years...maybe I'll tackle that next after Hebrew. I wasn't necessarily planning on a Semitic excursion, but why not

[Ogrim]

Having picked up my old Linguaphone course for Arabic again I remember why I was not very fond of it. One thing is that you have to work with at least two books at the same time (the text book which is only in Arabic and the grammar book which gives the vocabulary and the grammar explanations). Also, in the grammar book they almost exclusively use transliteration instead of Arabic script, and I am now at the stage where this irritates me a lot. Langenscheidt stops using transliteration in the word lists from lesson 6 and in the grammar explanations from lesson 8 and it just feels more natural. It still happens that I go to the wordlist at the end of the book to look up the transliteration of a word, but very rarely, and in most cases the pronunciation is what I thought it would be from reading the Arabic script.

I know I have ranted about transliteration in the past, so let me just say that I don't doubt that many people find it helpful. However, my main goals is to be able to read Arabic, learning to speak it is a secondary or tertiary objective, and in order to learn to read fluiently you just need to force yourself to "interpret" as much Arabic script as you can. When I read Latin or Cyrillic script I dont read one letter at the time, I see the group of letters forming a word as a unit and that is what my brain "translates" into meaning. I am still not there with Arabic, but getting closer and only more reading practice will bring me to that point.

My Russian class starts next week and I am looking forward to it. I don't know if any of my old "class mates" from last year will still be around, or if there will be any new ones, but I won't complain if we are a small group (last year there were four of us). The group is defined as B2/C1. I still have strong doubts as to whether my oral production is at B2, maybe on a very good day, but at least I should have a better vocuabulary after many hours of using the Kindle "flashcards" this summer. I am also slowly advancing with Дом, в котором… It is not an easy read. Apart from language issues, the story isn't linear, but seems to jump around telling a story from the perspective of different boys who live in the House. I'm not giving up though, it is a very interesting and well written book.

I can't read only one book at a time, especially not just in Russian, so I've also been through a biography about Ludwig van Beethoven in German, and this led me to start the mystery novel La décima sinfonía, written by Spanish journalist Máximo Pradera under the pseudonym of Joseph Gelinek (who was an Austrian composer and musician at the time of Mozart). The plot turns around the possible existence of the script for Beethoven's 10th symphony (which according to history he never composed). I am kind of tired of crime and mystery novels, but I am giving this one a chance because of the part music plays in the plot.

Thanks to forum member tiia over on Elenia's log I've discovered the Turkish-German comedian Kaya Yanar and I have been enjoying a few clips of him on YouTube. He often makes language-related jokes. Here is a video where part of the joke is the fact that he does not speak any Turkish:



I also came across one video where he does his stand-up routine in English, and in this clip he makes fun of Danish and Croatian phonetics.

[iguanamon]

Good to see you back here again, Ogrim. Malta looks fascinating and seems like you had a good vacation too! I know what you mean about transliteration. Of course, I had tremendous advantages when I learned to read Djudeo-espanyol/Ladino in Rashi and Meruba scripts. I already knew the language from Latin script.

... in order to learn to read fluently you just need to force yourself to "interpret" as much Arabic script as you can. When I read Latin or Cyrillic script I don't read one letter at the time, I see the group of letters forming a word as a unit and that is what my brain "translates" into meaning. I am still not there with Arabic, but getting closer and only more reading practice will bring me to that point. ...

That was what I noticed from learning to read in Rashi script. I saw words in chunks- "entonses, kon, komo, para, los, las"- the most common words. It wasn't so much reading each individual letter but seeing whole words or parts of words. Then they jumped out at me and now, I prefer to read Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol in Rashi. One of the inherent problems with courses is that they are "one size fits all" and this philosophy assumes that everyone will have the same difficulties, when obviously, not everyone does. You're right, more reading in Arabic script is the answer.

[Ogrim]

In my last post I said that I intended to be more active on the forum, but unfortunately I have not had a lot of time for that these last couple of weeks. It has been very busy at work, and I have spent some days in Brussels attending a conference and various meetings. It was nice to be back in Brussels, where I lived for seven years in the past, and I even got to hear some Flemish.

On the language learning front, my Russian classes have started again, and we are a group of four, which is a good size. The others are from the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Serbia respectively, so I am the only non-Slavic person in the room. (I am also the only man in the room, but that does not bother me ) What i find encouraging is that although the others have a Slavic language as their native language, their Russian is not that much better than mine. They do seem to have a somewhat richer vocabulary than I do, especially the girl from Bulgaria, but they make grammar mistakes just like I do, so clearly speaking Serbian or Czech does not give them that much of an advantage.

I am slowly advancing with Дом, в котором… but it is a really hard read, so I am tempted to let it rest for a while and try something a bit easier, maybe non-fiction, as reading the Tchaikovsky biography was a piece of cake compared to this novel.

Not much to say about Arabic, I keep plugging along slowly with Langenscheidt, and I have just started on one of the texts in Arabic Voices, but this one is still a bit too advanced for me, I need to get a full picture of the grammar. It is great for improving vocabulary though, so I'll probably work with the MSA texts whenever I have the time, but giving priority to Langenscheidt.

As for my other languages I continue to use them all regularly. I've been reading quite a bit about wine in Portuguese lately, as I have subscribed to the electronnic version of Revista de vinhos. Unfortunately it is very difficult to find decent Portuguese wine her in France (or any other decent non-French wine for that matter), so I can only read about the products, not taste them .

I had some problems receiving the Romansh newspaper La Quotidiana on my iPad lately, but after a few e-mail exchanges in German with the publisher, it now seems to work again, so I can get my daily dose of Romansh and learn the latest about local life in Grison. I also watch videos on RTR from time to time, but not as often as in the past due to lack of time.

I never really talk about what I do in English, maybe because English has been so much a part of my life for the last 30 years that I hardly consider it a "foreign" language. However I wanted to mention it now as I am reading The Story of Music by Howard Goodall, a British composer and TV/radio presenter. It is a book version of a TV series he made for BBC, and most of the episodes are available on YouTube for the time being (one episode is already blocked for copyright reasons). It is a great series and a great book if you are interested in (classical) music and how music evolved in the Western world. I've also started re-reading Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, one of my all-time favourite novels and a prime example of how beautiful the English language can be.

German has also become a language I use almost every day, although mostly through reading and listening to radio and TV. I am currently trying to get a better overview of the different German dialects, in particular those close to where I live, Swabian and Allemanic. Not that I will ever pretend to speak in dialect, but at least I want to be able to understand people better when they speak them.

I came across this videoclip from 1973 of the German comedian Peter Frankenfeld, where he presents the weather forecast in several dialects. You native Germans out there are better placed to judge his performance, but to my ear it sounds convincing!

[MattNeilsen]

Not much to say about Arabic, I keep plugging along slowly with Langenscheidt, and I have just started on one of the texts in Arabic Voices, but this one is still a bit too advanced for me, I need to get a full picture of the grammar. It is great for improving vocabulary though, so I'll probably work with the MSA texts whenever I have the time, but giving priority to Langenscheidt.

Does Arabic normally notate vowels in regular writing, or is it like Hebrew in that the diacritics are (normally) only used in religious & beginner material? I've noticed that vocab acquisition has been much slower in Hebrew than my previous languages since I have to look up audio for every word to make sure I know how it sounds. I don't know that I've come up with an elegant solution other than just exposing myself to the patterns a lot.

How have you been tackling that in Arabic?