Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

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Do you use transliteration in learning a new script? (please elaborate your thoughts...)

Yes, for a few weeks.
10
32%
Yes, for a month or more.
3
10%
Yes, for 6 months or longer.
5
16%
Not at all.
12
39%
I'm sticking to scripts I know.
1
3%
 
Total votes: 31

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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby zenmonkey » Tue Jan 25, 2022 8:57 pm

Beli Tsar wrote:
zenmonkey wrote:
AndyMeg wrote:This is definitely one of the reasons I want to move away from transliterations as soon as possible (and also why my early study includes a lot of pronunciation cards). Fluent Forever also highlights the need for early prosody work to reduce pronunciation errors.

Certainly for your Persian studies this makes sense - the spelling is relatively clear, compared to some of the other scripts mentioned above, and those I've known who relied on transliteration for Persian did struggle with pronunciation.

I realise this isn't to everyone's taste, but SRS vocab with audio does have an added positive here - small daily doses of easy use of the script, words that become familiar, with audio to make sure pronunciation is on track. Since it takes longer to get into reading proper, these micro-doses of script practice help more.


Agreed!

Persian: My SRS structure is as follows (I'm a beginner with less than 30 days in)

- alphabet/abjad cards - letters with name, sounds, and transliteration -> Plan: I'll reduce the visibility of the transliteration over time. And then delete these cards in a month or two.

- Teach Yourself Book vocabulary -> words, sentences in Persian with L1 translations and transliterations -> I hope to add sound from Forvo over time but have not done so as too time-consuming. No sound, just loading vocab. Plan: Replace L1 text by images when possible, add sound. Complete TYB, stop adding to this deck, and let it mature.

- Starnberg Persian 1800 high-frequency sentence -> words, sentences, with audio and transliteration. Not currently in use but once I use them, I'll edit the cards to keep the transliteration for a few months in really small print and then remove them from the cards. If I can, I'll try to add images and then use a conditional to hide the L1 text.

Not sure if I'll need a pronunciation-specific deck - may look into Gabriel Wyner's then or just start with a tutor or go over to Fiverr.com and pay someone to do a voice-over for sentences.
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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby katarinaantalya » Tue Jan 25, 2022 9:18 pm

I haven't done much in languages outside the Roman script, but for my brief sojourns with Russian and Persian (as well as plenty of research assignments with other languages using a wide variety of alphabets), I used IPA as a crutch where needed, sticking mostly to the native script. So for Cyrillic, maybe the easiest "other alphabet" for a speaker of Romanized European languages, my review cards were in Cyrillic, but my original notes would have an IPA transliteration, at least for the first few months. This is probably less practical for most, though, since I'm very proficient in IPA and comfortable creating my own transcriptions based on audio input.

On a whole, though, I think most transliterations are miserable affairs, and try to avoid them. IPA (and potentially other formalized academic phonetic alphabets) is my one indulgence.
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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby QueenBee » Thu Jan 27, 2022 10:03 am

zenmonkey wrote:The little I know about Thai would probably fit in a sentence.
But doesn't the Thai IPA allow for a standard way of writing? Or do you mean there isn't a romanized script?

I'm sure Thai can be transcribed via IPA, but I don't think most courses or learning tools (that use transliteration) use IPA specifically. They seem to use whatever transliteration the author/publisher makes up... the situation actually isn't as bad as it could be, I don't think I've seen a lot of weird or wildly different transliteration systems. But I can think of 2 problems with transliterating Thai:

1) No information about tones (which the Thai script itself does provide).

I've seen some transliterations of Mandarin Chinese where they put the number of the tone after the word, e.g. ma3. It might be possible to do this with Thai but, in practice, no one does. So if you're using a book or course that only has transliterated Thai, and there's no audio component to the course, you are basically left to guess the tones - which is a recipe for disaster.

2) Like many (all?) Sanskrit-influenced languages, Thai has a lot of consonants that would be the same in English, e.g. at least 4 different K's. I'm attaching a youtube video that goes through the Thai consonants - skip to 25 seconds into the video.

Each version of each consonant sounded different in Sanskrit, and as you can probably hear in the video above, Thai has preserved some of those differences, e.g. aspirated vs unaspirated K. But what about consonants that sound the same? In many cases, Thai has 2 versions of the exact same consonant (like the aspirated K), but whether the first or second gets used usually depends on the tone of the whole word. How on earth would someone be able to transcribe that information using Roman letters? And that's not to mention that, e.g. writing 'kh' for the aspirated K presents its own problems - 'kh' is also used to transcribe a throaty sound in Arabic, which could confuse a beginner in Thai who has studied other languages.

Basically, transcribing Thai in Roman letters just creates a lot of new (and avoidable) problems. You can learn the alphabet in a few days and make your life much easier instead.


zenmonkey wrote:
QueenBee wrote:
Wrt Hebrew and Arabic - both languages have ways to mark vowel sounds, making them purely phonetic. (In real life, this is only used in religious texts and children's literature. But my point is that it is possible to write abjads this way, make them phonetic and eliminating the need for transliteration.)

My experience with both was that it created additional steps that were often confusing and inexact. There are just too many exceptions with niqqud. And niqqud no longer reflects the current pronunciation. And there are 5 of them for the [a] sound... and at least one of them may also be something else... For me, it did not eliminate the need for transliteration early on, just created the additional weight of learning a large set of markers.

I had in mind cases where the learner is writing things down in a notebook (for example), or making Anki cards.

Since adults don't use nikkud in the real world, you could actually be completely forgiven for mixing up אַ and אָ in your study materials. As long as it helps you remember how the word is pronounced, and as long as you remember how to write it without nikkud later... that's all you really need.
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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby Querneus » Thu Jan 27, 2022 11:59 am

Personally I've liked using Arabic textbooks and grammars that use the unvowelled script + an academic romanization (typically the ISO/DIN one). You get to practise the script as it's used by adults from the get-go, without the clutter of vowel marks, which aren't commonly used in practice anyway (aside from, like, occasional clarifications). The academic romanization is your pronunciation guide. I'm well aware some resources for standard Arabic don't use a nice romanization though.

And this, in spite of romanization being very much unnecessary for standard Arabic, since the vowel marks are unambiguous.

The ambiguity of the אָ vowel mark in Hebrew sure seems annoying at first, but my vague understanding is that the vowel sound can be predicted largely well in most cases through rules, except when it's in closed unstressed syllables before the stress? I know very little Hebrew myself. Of course, in my (limited) experience learning Hebrew, the rules were not really taught; I was expected to just pick them up, I guess.
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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby Iversen » Fri Jan 28, 2022 9:00 am

I have not needed to learn a totally new script for some time, just variations on known ones. But I remember that my main technique for learning the Georgian and the Korean writing systems for upcoming voyages was to run through the alphabets using a language guide, and after that I used those books to transcribe several pages - and now I have forgotten both writing systems, but I remember that they were quite easy to learn. As for Russian I learned the Cyrillic alphabet for a trip to Moscow and (then) Leningrad in the mid 70s, so it was easy to refresh it later on. As for the variations on the Cyrillic writing system it was just a matter of learning a few new signs per language. And when I first have learned an alphabet I definitely don't want to read texts in transcription - it already feels awkward to read Serbian in Latinitsa.

In principle I could have done the same thing with a number of Southeast Asian alphabets because I have visited the countries that use them, but I knew from my experience with the Georgian and Korean scripts that I soon would forget them again because I didn't know the language they were used for, and those two were actually extremely simple compared to the writing systems of Southern India, Myan-Mar, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand. So there I would revert to the role of typical tourist and just communicate in English.

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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby Ogrim » Fri Jan 28, 2022 3:37 pm

zenmonkey wrote:Interesting quote from Ogrim a few years back. I've never loved the different types of transliteration between methods. So I tend to use a loose IPA and romanized vowels. How quickly do you all move away from transliteration?


Thanks for quoting me. I cannot remember in what thread I posted that or what question I replied to, but I still stand by what I said in that post. The only thing I would add today is that there can of course be situations where relying on transliterations is justified. For example, if I were to move to China or Japan for a year or two, I would want to be able to communicate orally with people on a basic level at least, and in order to do that I would most likely base my learning on audio with transliterated texts, knowing very well that reading the scripts of these languages is not something you learn in a few weeks or even months.

I haven't learnt any new script since I wrote that post, but if I were to pick up Armenian or Georgian today, I would have the same approach: Work intensively on learning the script from the outset and getting rid of transliterations as quickly as possible.
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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby Iversen » Fri Jan 28, 2022 9:39 pm

Two observations, having read Ogrim's answer above..

1) I'm NOT going to study Chinese soon, but if I did I would see it as two parallel learning projects: one would be Pinyin versus the Chinese language, and the other would be the Chinese signs versus Pinyin. Of course there is a connection to the language behind these two, but the specific problem here is to assign a sound/alphabetical value to a sign that has a meaning, but no simple way to guess the sound or alphabetical value.

2) I have sometimes used my own homebrewed phonetic transcriptions to study speech samples supplied by a number of speakers. But since the written language has become ever more important in my learning process I have done those phonetic exercises less often. The simple method runs as follows: listen to something in a system where it is easy to repeat a short snippet, like a speech synthethizer or Audacity. And then try to write down exactly what you hear, even if your books suggest that you should have heard something else.
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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby księżycowy » Sun Jan 30, 2022 10:54 am

This question reminds me of how I learned Japanese kana (mostly hiragana, but also some katakana), and have attempted to learn Tibetan script.

For Japanese I was using Assimil at the time, which does have romaji under the kana and kanji (at least my English edition does anyway). I would cover up the romaji with an index card and listen to the dialogue while reading the kana a few times. After about the first ten Lessons or so, I had hiragana down well (and whatever katakana that happened to appear). I credit that with how my ability to read Japanese kana has stuck with me, even through the lulls.

I've tried something similar with Tibetan using Fluent Tibetan. I never got too far, but it was working. The textbook hardly uses any romanization, and teaches the script through audio recordings primarily.

Generally I try to not bother with transliteration if I can avoid it.
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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby leosmith » Tue Feb 01, 2022 3:53 am

I couldn’t answer the poll question, because what I did in my earlier languages and what I do/recommend now are different. Also, I didn’t know what “I’m sticking to the scripts I know” meant – I assumed it meant L2 has a script very similar to L1, so transliteration doesn’t help, but I wasn’t sure.

Spanish, French, Portuguese, Swahili and Tagalog are too close to my native English to make transliteration worthwhile.

I never used transliteration for Russian or Korean because learning the actual scripts take no more time than learning the transliteration.

For Chinese characters in Mandarin, I defined the pronunciation with pinyin, which is the actual phonetic script of Mandarin adopted by China, although it is not used in writing. For Chinese characters in Japanese, I defined the pronunciation with the Japanese phonetic script (kana). These are the most commonly recommended ways to learn Chinese character pronunciation for these languages.


With Thai, I used transliteration for a long time before switching to the actual script. In my defense, I lacked the experience/confidence to learn the script without transliteration at that time. My only regret is that I stayed with transliteration for too long, perhaps 2 years.

With Japanese, I started out with romaji, the official Japanese transliteration that is not used in writing, and stayed with it for about 6 months before switching to kana. Kana is very simple, so I consider this to be my biggest “mistake” in using transliteration. Learners are normally urged not to use romaji at all.

QueenBee wrote:the Thai script is dead useful. It's phonetic

I wouldn’t say that; it’s certainly one of the least phonetic languages I speak. I mean, compared to English, yes, but there are so many words in Thai whose spellings you have memorize to be able to read them properly, I can’t bring myself to consider it phonetic.

Beli Tsar wrote:with alphabets and abjads, there is no point in delaying learning them because they are 1) really easy to pick up
Imo, this is not the case with Thai. I'm not saying you should use transliteration, but expect to spend maybe 10X as long as it takes to learn kana, for example. It takes a hearty language learner to avoid transliteration for that long.

QueenBee wrote:No information about tones
Ime, most transliteration systems in learning materials include tone information (Becker, Teach Yourself, FSI, etc). However, when Thais informally romanize the language to try to help us out, or when ex-pats who don’t know how to write with script message each other, they often use these sloppy/inconsistent romanized scripts that have no tones.

QueenBee wrote:skip to 25 seconds into the video
you can use right click>copy video url at current time.

QueenBee wrote:You can learn the alphabet in a few days
Most can’t, imo. As I said, it took me about 10X as long as learning the kana. I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, but I don’t think we should imply that it’s easier than it is.
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Re: Do you use transliterations when learning a new script?

Postby bolaobo » Tue Feb 01, 2022 1:47 pm

I only do it for Persian, Arabic, and some of the trickier, less common Devanagari conjuncts. I also use Pinyin when learning new Chinese characters if that counts, but otherwise I'd have no idea how to pronounce it.

For Persian, diacritics for vowels are almost never used. For Arabic, they're sometimes used but I read them too slowly so on the back of my SRS card I put the transliteration until I get more comfortable with it.
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