Purangi's Log

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Purangi
Orange Belt
Posts: 138
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2018 7:57 pm
Languages: French, English, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish
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Purangi's Log

Postby Purangi » Mon Nov 26, 2018 6:31 am

Hello everyone!

Over the course of 2019, I have decided to dabble in two languages of the Caribbean region: Haitian Creole and Papiamentu. While doing so, I also plan to continue working on my Spanish to eventually bring it to the next level.

This journey that will be both challenging but, I am sure, very rewarding!

First, a little bit about me:

– My native language is French, the language I speak with my family and in which I was educated. Although I was exposed to English from a young age (through TV), I only learned to speak and write later in high school.

– As an undergrad, I developed interest for Russian, and ended up learning the language to an advanced level and spending two years in Russia. That was around 10 years ago – so while I can still read Russian fluently, my speaking abilities are not what they used to be. I do not try to maintain the language other than by reading novels occasionally (I did enjoy Чёрный город and Не прощаюсь) or conversing when travelling in CIS countries.

– After Russia, I turned my attention to China and Mandarin. I moved to the PRC about six years ago, where I now work as a French-Mandarin translator. Mandarin is part of my daily life, so I maintain it automatically just by going to work. I taught myself traditional characters over the past year (that was long overdue) and try to read interesting materials (i.e. non-PRC materials) daily to keep them fresh in my memory.

– I have been studying Spanish daily over the last year or so with FSI, Assimil and Pimsleur. I have reached a level where I am comfortable reading novels and following podcasts with transcripts (I am a big fan of Radio Ambulante). I still have much work to do improve my oral comprehension and hold a normal paced conversation.

– I have become increasingly interested in creole languages over the past months due to personal reasons. I will be moving back home to Montreal soon, where Haitian Creole is part of city’s fabric. The city is home to an important Haitian community (about 2.3% of the total population) and shares historical and cultural links with Haiti.

Papiamentu has been a recent discovery for me – and a fascinating one, I might add. There is something about a creole bringing together Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch and West African influences that is intriguing and just plain beautiful.

Unlike Mandarin, Spanish, HC and Papiamentu are purely fun projects for me – I do not intend on making them part of my professional activities, but who knows where this project will lead me? Plus, I am interested in travelling in Central America, Haiti and ABC islands in the near future.

I will be posting about where I am at in these languages, my goals and my materials soon!
Last edited by Purangi on Wed Oct 21, 2020 11:34 pm, edited 6 times in total.
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iguanamon
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2352
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 11:14 am
Location: Virgin Islands
Languages: Speaks: English (Native); Spanish (C2); Portuguese (C2); Haitian Creole (C1); Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol (C1); Lesser Antilles French Creole (B2)
Studies: Catalan
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=797
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Re: Haitian Creole/Papiamentu/Spanish

Postby iguanamon » Mon Nov 26, 2018 11:51 am

Welcome to the forum, Purangi. Have a look at the Haitian Creole Study Group. I have outlined almost all the resources I have used to learn Haitian Creole there. With French as your native language, you will have many advantages in learning Haitian Creole. Our member Expugnator has learned Papiamentu.

Creole languages have fewer resources available for learners but there are a sufficient amount of them out there for you to be able to learn. Kreyòl has been and continues to be one of my favorite languages. Haitians are a warm and friendly people and have been helpful to me as a learner. If I can be of help to you, please let me know. Looking forward to following your progress. Bòn chans!
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Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
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Re: Haitian Creole/Papiamentu/Spanish

Postby Expugnator » Mon Nov 26, 2018 6:57 pm

Bon bini na LLORG, Purangi. Mi ta haña hopi interesante ku por fin a yega un hende aki na e foro ku tambe ta siña su mes Papiamentu! Bo a bai algun bia na islanan Aruba, Boneiru of Kòrsou? Mi ta sigur ku lo ta gustabo por papia e idioma aki!

Besides Papiamentu, I'm also looking forward to knowing more about how you got to a higher level in Russian and Mandarin. These are the two most important languages I struggle with at the moment.

Welcome again, hope you feel at home here.
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Corrections welcome for any language.

Purangi
Orange Belt
Posts: 138
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2018 7:57 pm
Languages: French, English, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish
x 635

Re: Haitian Creole/Papiamentu/Spanish

Postby Purangi » Wed Nov 28, 2018 2:22 am

iguanamon wrote:Welcome to the forum, Purangi. Have a look at the Haitian Creole Study Group. I have outlined almost all the resources I have used to learn Haitian Creole there. With French as your native language, you will have many advantages in learning Haitian Creole. Our member Expugnator has learned Papiamentu.

Creole languages have fewer resources available for learners but there are a sufficient amount of them out there for you to be able to learn. Kreyòl has been and continues to be one of my favorite languages. Haitians are a warm and friendly people and have been helpful to me as a learner. If I can be of help to you, please let me know. Looking forward to following your progress. Bòn chans!


Mèsi anpil, iguanamon! Your Kreyòl log and your success in learning the language have been an inspiration for me, as well as a useful reference to find and prepare materials. Mwen swete ou bon kouraj e bon travay!
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Purangi
Orange Belt
Posts: 138
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2018 7:57 pm
Languages: French, English, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish
x 635

Re: Haitian Creole/Papiamentu/Spanish

Postby Purangi » Wed Nov 28, 2018 2:29 am

Expugnator wrote:Bon bini na LLORG, Purangi. Mi ta haña hopi interesante ku por fin a yega un hende aki na e foro ku tambe ta siña su mes Papiamentu! Bo a bai algun bia na islanan Aruba, Boneiru of Kòrsou? Mi ta sigur ku lo ta gustabo por papia e idioma aki!

Besides Papiamentu, I'm also looking forward to knowing more about how you got to a higher level in Russian and Mandarin. These are the two most important languages I struggle with at the moment.

Welcome again, hope you feel at home here.


Masha danki, Expugnator! I am happy to see that someone has actually learned Papiamentu here. If you can recommend me learning materials, any suggestion would be more than welcome. And if you have any questions about Russian or Mandarin, please ask away, I will help you as much as I can, although I am not sure my learning method can serve as an example.
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Purangi
Orange Belt
Posts: 138
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2018 7:57 pm
Languages: French, English, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish
x 635

Re: Haitian Creole/Papiamentu/Spanish

Postby Purangi » Wed Nov 28, 2018 2:55 am

Before we get going, let’s first take stock of where we are in terms of reading and oral comprehension in my target languages.

----

First, Haitian Creole. So, just how much can an educated French speaker understand HC, without prior exposure?

Unsurprisingly, the answer is: it depends.

For reading comprehension, I picked up a random news article on Lavwadlamerik and I could easily understand 118 of the 172 words (69%). But this is misleading: most of the words that were not readily transparent to me are prepositions and articles, all of which are easy to infer from context. Therefore, I can easily understand around 95-98% of the content.

That's encouraging, but it’s all downhill from there. I understood about 172 of the 354 words in a transcribed interview on Haiti Liberte, i.e. 48%. While I can still get the “gist” of the interview, parts of some sentences (and definitively most of the nuances expressed by the interviewee) remain obscure. I estimate my comprehension to be around 75%.

In a short literary story included in Bryant Freeman’s Ann Bay Lodyans, I understood only 88 words out of 263 words (33%), making it very difficult to follow along.

As for oral comprehension, things also vary widely. I get about 75% of Lawadlamerik host Jacquelin Belizaire’s formal, clear speech. When listening to fast, spontaneous Creole, as it is spoken on Tripotay Lakay, comprehension falls to around 25-40%, depending on the topic.

One thing remains constant: I always better understand hosts than their interviewees. This is especially striking when watching vox pop such as this one.

My goal over the next year is to boost comprehension on both aspects, and to be able to actually hold a conversation in HC. Ideally, I would like to travel in Haiti using nothing but Creole.

----

As for Papiamentu, since I am a total beginner, there is not much to evaluate. In the next year, my goals are more modest: to be able to read newspapers and boost oral comprehension. Because of the lack of learning materials, learning to converse in Papiamentu seems a bit far fetched at the moment, but who knows? A quick look at a newspaper (Diario) tells me I can recognize about half of the words in any given article, which is encouraging and gives me a solid basis on which to go forward.

----

In Spanish, I am currently between A2 and B1, according to Kwiziq. This is a bit lower than I expected, especially since I have been reading Orwell's 1984 without major comprehension problems. But it is true that verb conjugation, not vocabulary, remains my main weakness. My goal is to retake that very same test in one year and jump from A2-B1 to B2. Also, if you know of any other good and reliable self-assessment tests for Spanish, I would be very happy to know them!
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Jaleel10
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Location: Springbok, South Africa
Languages: Afrikaans (N), English (N)
Spanish (Advanced-B2)
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Re: Haitian Creole/Papiamentu/Spanish

Postby Jaleel10 » Wed Nov 28, 2018 5:52 am

Purangi wrote:In Spanish, I am currently between A2 and B1, according to Kwiziq. This is a bit lower than I expected, especially since I have been reading Orwell's 1984 without major comprehension problems. But it is true that verb conjugation, not vocabulary, remains my main weakness. My goal is to retake that very same test in one year and jump from A2-B1 to B2. Also, if you know of any other good and reliable self-assessment tests for Spanish, I would be very happy to know them!


Bienvenid@ al foro, Purangi o/

The Instituto Cervantes placement test is a lekker comprehensive one for Spanish. It consists out of three parts. Part 1 - vocab/grammar Part 2 - reading comprehension Part 3 - listening comprehension.

I wish you the best of luck with your studies!
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iguanamon
Black Belt - 2nd Dan
Posts: 2352
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 11:14 am
Location: Virgin Islands
Languages: Speaks: English (Native); Spanish (C2); Portuguese (C2); Haitian Creole (C1); Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol (C1); Lesser Antilles French Creole (B2)
Studies: Catalan
Language Log: viewtopic.php?t=797
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Re: Haitian Creole/Papiamentu/Spanish

Postby iguanamon » Wed Nov 28, 2018 12:56 pm

Purangi wrote:...First, Haitian Creole. So, just how much can an educated French speaker understand HC, without prior exposure?...My goal over the next year is to boost comprehension on both aspects, and to be able to actually hold a conversation in HC. Ideally, I would like to travel in Haiti using nothing but Creole. ... In Spanish, I am currently between A2 and B1, according to Kwiziq. This is a bit lower than I expected, especially since I have been reading Orwell's 1984 without major comprehension problems. But it is true that verb conjugation, not vocabulary, remains my main weakness. ...

I've found that learning a related language means that the devil is all in the details. I have done this with related languages having a Spanish base. Having learned some Romance languages as second languages (in my case) means that I started with a huge head start in vocabulary and grammar with Catalan. I can easily read non-fiction. I have few problems reading fiction (vocabulary and idioms primarily) but passive language activity does not mean that I am internalizing conjugations and grammar. For that, I need a course to put me to work on concentrating on those details and conjugations. I didn't want to do a course. I still don't like having to do a course, but it gives me the focus I need to concentrate on those details. I started Catalan by reading and watching a series and the conjugations are one of my issues as well, even with knowing Spanish and Portuguese. That's one of the reasons that tipped me towards learning HC rather than French, easy conjugations and phonetic spelling.

I'm not surprised that the "Ann bay l'odyans" stories are more difficult for you. I wasn't able to read them until after I finished the DLI Haitian Creole Basic Course. With you being a native French-speaker your path to HC will probably, and most definitely should, be different than mine. Fortunately for learning Kreyòl, verb conjugation isn't anywhere near as much of an issue as it is with Spanish. While for me, as an English-speaker, the phonetic Kreyòl orthography was a blessing, as a French-speaker, I can see where it would be otherwise. Looking forward to following your journey in Kreyòl.
Purangi wrote:Mèsi anpil, iguanamon! Your Kreyòl log and your success in learning the language have been an inspiration for me, as well as a useful reference to find and prepare materials. Mwen swete ou bon kouraj e bon travay!

Deryen! Mèsi anpil ou menm. M byen kontan konnen ke blòg mwen ka sèvi pou ba ou enspirayson konsa. M swete ou bòn chans avè kreyòl ak lang panyòl la osi. Petèt w'a prale aprann kreyòl pi vit pase lang panyòl la, omwens m kwè sa. Si m ka ede ou, tanpri, se jis pou mande m.
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Expugnator
Black Belt - 1st Dan
Posts: 1728
Joined: Sat Jul 18, 2015 9:45 pm
Location: Belo Horizonte
Languages: Native Brazilian Portuguese#advanced fluency English, French, Papiamento#basic fluency Italian, Norwegian#intermediate Spanish, German, Georgian and Chinese (Mandarin)#basic Russian, Estonian, Greek (Modern)#just started Indonesian, Hebrew (Modern), Guarani
Language Log: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... =15&t=9931
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Re: Haitian Creole/Papiamentu/Spanish

Postby Expugnator » Wed Nov 28, 2018 8:15 pm

There is really not much for Papiamentu. I've written here at my old Papiamento log at HTLAL:

Papiamento cuts in line

More than that, I remember some pdfs from papiamento.aw , but these are from Aruba so the orthography is different.

There is a series of documentaries with subtitles in English on Youtube, from Aruba as well, at the Rebeca Roos youtube channel.

Other than that, I listen to news from TeleCuraçao, read retkaribense and Vigilante Korsou.
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Corrections welcome for any language.

Purangi
Orange Belt
Posts: 138
Joined: Fri Oct 05, 2018 7:57 pm
Languages: French, English, Mandarin, Russian, Spanish
x 635

Re: Haitian Creole/Papiamentu/Spanish

Postby Purangi » Fri Nov 30, 2018 7:56 am

Expugnator wrote:There is really not much for Papiamentu. I've written here at my old Papiamento log at HTLAL:

Papiamento cuts in line

More than that, I remember some pdfs from papiamento.aw , but these are from Aruba so the orthography is different. There is a series of documentaries with subtitles in English on Youtube, from Aruba as well, at the Rebeca Roos youtube channel. Other than that, I listen to news from TeleCuraçao, read retkaribense and Vigilante Korsou.


Awesome! I did not know about your blog, but I bookmarked it and will definitely come back to it again in the next week.
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