malach's log - Bengali and German

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malach
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby malach » Tue Mar 10, 2020 1:16 am

Bengali

I spent most days this week working on my vocabulary lists. I have nearly 400 words written out now, over the past month or so. I'm using a "goldlist style" of rewriting the lists, to slowly reduce the number of words every fortnight, but I'm using a "non-goldlist style" by actively going through the lists in between. The words from Thompson's book are sticking quickest, because I also hear them on the book's CD when I drive to/from work, but the other words do come up in reading.

What else?

  • I completed Unit 10 of Thompson's Beginner's book, which covers several idiomatic sentence structures.
  • Writing is slowly coming back, as I have written a minimum 50 words a day this week.
  • Listened to some radio interviews on the BBC Bengali website. The speakers usually articulate their words well enough so I know what they are saying, even if I don't understand it.
  • Translated several headlines, again from the BBC Bengali website.
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby IronMike » Thu Mar 12, 2020 4:31 pm

Perhaps you've already seen this article? Bengali: the language that sparked a revolution
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malach
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby malach » Thu Mar 12, 2020 5:03 pm

IronMike wrote:Perhaps you've already seen this article? Bengali: the language that sparked a revolution


I hadn't seen that article, but I'm familiar with the history. Thanks for the link!
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malach
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby malach » Mon Mar 16, 2020 2:36 pm

Bengali

I've been making good progress with my vocabulary lists. I went through the 400 words I've so far written out on saturday, and I know more than 300 of them now (BN->EN). So that's 300 new words in around 2 months.

The grammar section of Thompson on different sentence structures has proven a sticking point. Although I have studied and understand the materials, applying them correctly is difficult. Also, when I get a sentence in Bengali I can look at it and find it impossible to translate the meaning, even though I know each of the words and the structure the sentence is meant to illustrate. This probably just needs practice to become more familiar with the different pieces of these sentences.

To tackle this:

  • I've written out a page of the example sentences with my vocabulary lists, which I will review. I will continue this for each of the problem structures.
  • Take each structure in turn and simply write out a page of example sentences of that type.
Overall progress:

  • Finished Unit 11 of Thompson - the grammar section here was easier, being conditional statements which I already seem to have a good handle on. The English->Bengali translation exercise is very useful practice.
  • Continued to hand-write 50+ words a day, and consciously trying to use more complex sentence structures.
  • At least three complete 'listens' to the Bengali CD in the car.
  • Continued work on the vocabulary lists.
  • Read more pages from Citizen Test parallel-language book.
I'm not far off finishing Thompson, except for practising the grammar. Unit 12 discusses tenses, and Unit 14 mostly seems to introduce new vocabulary. So Unit 13 is the main grammar topic left, which covers joining sentences and correlatives.

German

I haven't done any reading as yet, but I found the Open University's free German courses. I've started "Intermediate German: Understanding spoken German" which seems about right for now.
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malach
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby malach » Sun Mar 22, 2020 10:29 pm

Bengali

I have continued with my word lists. I now have over 500 words written out, and my BN->EN recall of these is pretty good. EN->BN is also improving, and I test myself that way round for the earlier pages of words.

Having to work at home has stopped my listening to Bengali... I will have to retrieve my CD from the car, and try to make some time for it at home. Listening with the text in front of me is probably a good idea for now anyway, for the latter half of the book.

The grammar of Units 10 and 11 from Thompson's book is still troublesome. Sometimes when I do her exercises I'm not sure if my translation into Bengali is an alternative or is wrong... But the main thing is that I can recognise and understand these sentence types when reading, and I think I'm better at that.

Overall progress:

  • Vocabulary lists now at 525 words which I'm working through regularly.
  • Finished Unit 12 of Thompson, on the use of verb tenses. There are some places where Bengali uses tense which are not as in English, so the topic needs some care.
  • Continued to hand-write 50+ words a day.
  • Read more pages from the 'Life in UK' book. Noticing more and more words from those I've recently started learning, which is encouraging.

German

Practice to not-forget:

  • I finished the OpenLearn level 1 Intermediate German course. This was quite challenging at first as a listening exercise. I am starting the more advanced ones too, which will mean more new vocabulary.
  • Read several more 'toots' in German, and I find I can usually get by with only looking up one or two words to understand the whole.
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malach
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby malach » Mon Apr 06, 2020 5:50 pm

Well, this tends to happen. My attention got shifted and I have done next to nothing for the past couple of weeks, language related. The cause is that other "language" interest of mine, where the names are Java, Lisp, Ruby etc, all stirred up by coming around to this topic again in my lectures!

I do have a plan though. I've found some papers on text analysis for Bengali - writing stemming algorithms, semantic analysis etc. So I'm thinking of trying to implement some of those. Thompson's book suggests that going from an inflected Bengali verb form to its canonical form should almost be algorithmic - anyhow, it looks like an interesting challenge to code up.
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malach
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby malach » Wed Apr 15, 2020 11:55 pm

Bengali

After a few weeks 'off', I'm back to looking at Bengali again. I want to finish up Thompson's Beginner's book. I have two chapters left, and revision, revision, revision.

  • Worked through my vocabulary lists. I have 600 words written out, and seem to remember a good deal of them already.
  • Read the dialogs and prose passages in Thompson as revision, back up to chapter 12.

My coding diversion has helped consolidate some grammar, especially with verb forms:

  • My simple stemmer program is working. The main challenge was identifying all the word endings that the paper had counted. I'm still short of a few, but the search led me through sections of Thompson's larger Grammar book.
  • The verb->verbal form program is also under testing. Bengali has a very regular verb system, with just a few 'special cases'.

German

I've been reading one or two pieces of German each day (social media postings, around 30 words a time). I think the author is often describing what he sees out of his window, and so the vocabulary sometimes repeats, which is helpful.

I started a second OpenLearn course, Intermediate German: The World of Work. They have passages of authentic spoken German, which I find hard going and I often resort to the transcripts.
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malach
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby malach » Thu Apr 30, 2020 2:00 am

Bengali

Hurray, I've finished Thompson's book! I've gone through all the chapters and materials. This mostly duplicates what I already 'knew' from Radice, but it's been helpful to see the grammar described from a different perspective and ... well ... most of this information has got buried in my brain.

What now? Vocabulary is lacking, and this is apparent whenever I pick something up to read. I'm working on the new words I've read in Thompson's book, plus others, my plan is to get comfortable with another 1000 words this year. That should be achievable.

But now I think I should focus on input. So I may follow the Super Challenge that is about to start. 5000 pages of books, and 9000 minutes of films, in 20 months. Rounding off, that's an average of 9 pages and 15 minutes a day, for 600 days. I have plenty of reading material, but 9 pages a day just now will take a long time. But probably if I start with 2-3 pages a day I can speed up later. The 'film' part seems more challenging in terms of content: I am in the category of owning just 5 bengali films! 20 times each? I'm sure I can find some more, and there are materials on youtube.

This may end up a 'half challenge'!

German

I'm still working on the OpenLearn course - not made a lot of progress. But I am daily reading two or three short passages on social media.
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tungemål
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby tungemål » Thu Apr 30, 2020 4:56 pm

Thanks for the tip on OpenLearn German course. I will maybe start one myself. How do you like it? Is it based on videos or podcasts?
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malach
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Re: malach's log - Bengali and German

Postby malach » Thu Apr 30, 2020 5:51 pm

tungemål wrote:Thanks for the tip on OpenLearn German course. I will maybe start one myself. How do you like it? Is it based on videos or podcasts?


The ones I've been doing have videos and a bit of text. There's a transcript available for the videos, and comprehension questions with answers you can reveal etc. I find the videos challenging, at intermediate level.

https://www.open.edu/openlearn/languages/all-content/?filter=date/list/604/freecourses/0/all/all/all/
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