Iversen's second multiconfused log thread

[Iversen]

EN: Yesterday I spent more time on studying opening hours for museums and zoos etc. than I did on studying languages, and all these sources were of course in Danish. I can see that I get a busy summer, but it is also pretty clear that I won't be leaving the country in the near future. Even if some airlines may resume flights to places like Greece and Southern Italy I doubt that the touristical infrastructure will be intact, and that the usual array of sights will be open. And travelling to places where it will cost you two weeks incarceration is of course out of the question.

SW: Jag läste också några texter om Corona på svenska internetkällor, och här stötte jag på ett omnämnande av en studie bland anställda på Karolinska (ett stort sjukhus i Stockholm). Det föreslogs att detta skulle kunna användas för att bedöma omfattningen av spridningen och immuniseringen i hela Stockholm, men när studiet endast inkluderar anställda på ett enda sjukhus är detta uppenbarligen överdrivet. Men vad som verkligen är slående är att det finns människor som BÅDE har virus och antikroppar - det tyder inte på att gruppimmunitet någonsin kommer att bli relevant! Självaste herr Tegnell har därför också sakt att detta aldrig har varit målet, men vissa trodde att det var själva idén bakom den relativt milda svenska politiken på detta område.

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EN: Today I have so far focused on my language studies. I have studied a couple more texts from the Icelandic Lifandi Visindi about astronomy, and after that I studied the passage about the Ordovician in my Indonesian Sejarah Bumi (Earth history).

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[Iversen]

Since the museums and zoos were allowed to reopen I have visited three of them in my own town, and later this week I'll visit the rest. As for the libraries they were allowed to open earlier this month, but only for borrowing and returning books and other materials - not for sitting down to read, which is slightly mysterious since you now can sit down and munch food to your heart's delight in a restaurant (with minimum space regulations and rules for cleanliness, of course). As for borrowing books home I haven't done that much for many years, mostly because the books in 'funny languages' almost exclusively are literary and I prefer non fiction. Which means that I nowadays mostly read stuff on the internet or stuff I have found during my travels in the good old days.

But no rule without exceptions so I have borrowed a book in Danish by the name of "Alle Dages Turisme", which features authentic quotes (in translation if necessary) from ancient travelogues from Herodot to Hakon Mielche. I mention this because there is one quote (p.75) from the memoires of Danish/Norwegian professor and comedy author Ludvig Holberg which is so precisely aimed at us modern language learners that I even have taken to trouble to produce a translation of it so that you don't have to use a computer program (not even in secret). The original version can be seen below, and those of you who study Danish may notice some oldfashioned spellings and expressions, but nothing that that would spoil the serene peace of mind of any Dane. However you shouldn't try to emulate the style of the text unless you want to come over as an anachronistic joke.

"Omsider kom jeg gandske træt til Paris, hvor jeg gik forgæves en heel time i Staden, og søgte efter Logement; thi efterdi jeg ikke ret pronuncerede det Franske Ord Logis, var der ingen der forstod mig; jeg hørde med Ærgrelse en pige i Paris, som gjorde denne Critique over min udtale: Han taler Fransk, som en Tydsk Hest. Denne tort var noget haard for mig at fordøye, saasom jeg bildte mig ind at være Mester udi Franskem, og nu syntes en Tjenestepige, at jeg talte det ilde. Den Stavelse Gi, som vi ikke ret kand udtale, gjorde at jeg maatte løbe saa got som landflygtig igiennem alle Gaderne i Forstaden. Foruden dette, saa kalder de i Paris et Logement ikke logis, men chambre garnie, de syntes og ikke at jeg spurgte efter Logemente, snarere efter en Maitresse, ikke efter logie, men Lucie, hvorudover nogle smilede, naar jeg spurte dem derom, sigende: Je ne la connais point, Monsieur! at Jeg kiender hende intet, min Herre! ..."

"Eventually I came to Paris, dead tired, where I spent a whole hour walking around in the city in search of lodging. However since I did not pronounce the French word 'Logis' correctly no one understood me. I heard with annoyance a girl in Paris who made this criticism of my pronunciation: "He speaks French like a German horse". This tort was hard for me to swallow as I imagined myself being a master of French, and now a maid thought that I spoke it badly. The syllable 'gi', which we [Danes] have so much trouble pronouncing correctly, caused me to run as a fugitive through all the streets of the suburbs. To boot, in Paris they call a lodging not 'logis', but 'chambre garnie', so they also didn't think that I asked for accommodation, but rather for a maitresse, i.e. not for lodging, but for Lucie, which made some of them smile when I asked them about it, saying "Je ne la connais point, Monsieur!" (I don't know her at all, sir!) ... "

I have of course also studied a fair number of texts in quite a few languages since my latest message here (from Sunday), but if you have worked your way through the long rant above you have definitely earned a bit of peace and quiet from me. Maybe tomorrow ...

Holberg.jpg

[Iversen]

When I write about my activities I tend to mention the short texts I have worked on, but not the stuff I just have read through extensively on the internet (or in my newpaper - but then it is in Danish, which is another reason not to mention it). But I'll make an exception. A few days ago I accidentally heard a reference to a 'pandora' virus on one of those pseudoscientific channels which my cable provider has chosen to send to me. The point was (as usual) that it had come from outer space, possibly wilfully seminated by aliens from somewhere out there. But then I looked it up on the internet, and it actually seems that there is such a thing. Since much of the research has been conducted by French scientists I mostly read about it in French, and the point is that the scientists now know five species, but these five species don't share most of their DNA with each other - and even less with anything else in the world. But they have enormously much of it, thousands of times more than ordinary vira. They mostly attack amoeba so that's why we haven't bothered so far.

OK next phase: today I wanted to write about this virus and therefore I made a Google search - but somehow ended up reading about Trump who is furious because Twitter attached a critical comment to one of his enunciations and now he has wowed to attack the social media, and from there onwards to an episode from 2012 from the Simpsons, where Bart had spread a false message about a virus being rampant on the cruise ship where his family spent their holiday - with the intention of getting the holiday prolonged indefinitely. Something like that actually happened to several cruise ships during the corona crisis, and some have suggested that this be one more true prophecy in a comic strip- like the one in Doomesbury that predicted that Trump some day would become the president of the USA. But corona isn't the first epidemic to hit mankind, and the creators of Simpsons have denied that they have prophetic powers.

IT: Infatti la parola "quarantena" deriva da un regolamento veneziano storico che imponeva agli equipaggi di navi straniere di attendere quaranta giorni 'in quarantena' prima di ottenere l'accesso alla città, - una misura sensata per diminuire il rischio di epidemie.

OK, back to my studies. As I have suggested in another thread I can't keep myself from studying more than one language at any time - unless I am on holiday and haven't brought my PC and even less my home library. The last couple of days I have been adding to my Polish wordlist, based on the big fat green Pons dictionary - so it will take some time to reach the letter Ż (please note the dot). Actually Polish is one of the languages with a Latin alphabet that have forced me to amend my handwriting: I have to be very careful about writing dots as dots because there also are letters with 'accent aigus' like Ć, Ń, Ó, Ś and Ź, and I had to change my t's because they looked too much like Polish ł's. Another case is Dutch, where I place a dot over my j's because of the frequent digraph ij (Afrikans has solved the problem by using y instead of ij). And since there are so many u-less q's in Albanian I often drop the horizontal line over the bottom part of them in that language - but not in other languages

And here is the list of the texts I worked on yesterday:

IN: Tentu saja, saya telah belajar sedikit lebih banyak tentang sejarah bumi dalam teks panjang saya dalam bahasa Indonesia.

SER: Сада сам користио последње своје текстове на српском језику о неутринима. Сада морам да направим нову колекцију о некој другој теми.

BU: Такође сам користио последње своје текстове о бугарској праисторији, али не и предзадњи, што је прилично мучан технички преглед датирања керамике.

FR: En plus de lire des informations sur l'énorme virus Pandora en français directement sur l'ecran, j'ai également imprimé et étudié un article français sur le Gigantopithecus. En fait, très peu des restes fossiles ont été trouvées après cette créature (surtout des dents de taille enorme), mais à partir de celles-ci, on a estimé que le singe pouvait mesurer jusqu'à trois mètres en haut - mais peut-être était-il minuscule et avait juste des dents énormes? Gigantopithecus s'est d'ailleurs avéré être un parent éteint des orangoutans et evidemment ceux qui croient au sasquatch et au yetis ont considéré la possibilité que les GigantoP aient survécu à rebours jusqu'à nos jours et maintenant marchent autour le monde de manière que les producteurs de 'documentaires' pseudoscientifiques puissent gagner encore plus de fric.

AF: Tot my laaste versameling tekste oor Afrikaans het ek geen vertaling aangeheg nie - en ek mis dit ook nie. Afrikaans is dus in dieselfde kategorie gekomen as Frans, waar ek ook nie 'n voordeel trek uit 'n vertaling nie. My teks gister (uit psigotydsckrif.za) het gehandel oor hoe mense met 'n swak selfbewustheid beter presteer as hulle sy voorstel dat hulle Einstein is. Sou dit ook taalstudente help as hulle speel dat hulle Mezzofanti of Hale is?

Gigantopithecus blacki.jpg

[Iversen]

Since yesterday I have mainly focused on one task, namely the first repetition round for those more than seven hundred Polish words that have congregated in rank and file on two full A4 sheets since I started my current Polish wordlist campaign. And it is hard to find something interesting to say about that kind of task.

Besides I have been visiting museums in my town and plan to spend a lot of time on excursions to other sightseeing places that now have reopened. They have all suffered immense financial damage, but I have to say that the visitor numbers so far have been disappointing. When an institution reopens it has to stop claiming the partial coverage from the state of its expenses, so if it then doesn't receive the expected number of Danish visitors then the calculations don't add up. And even though the border closures now slowly are being lifted for certain groups of visitors from certain countries to most of the country (excluding our capital Copenhagen, where by far the largest concentration of corona cases has been seen) we have yet to see the foreign visitors to actually return. And the Danes? Well, maybe they think that museum visits only is possible during holidays outside their own town, but in that case they are wrong.

This tourism thing will of course influence the amount of time I have for studying, but also the possibilities I have for reporting about them so my updates may become slightly more irregular in the coming time. I haven't bought a smart phone yet but the pressure mounts..

IT: Per quanto riguarda i viaggi all'estero ... beh, pare che un certo numero di paesi ora accetterà visitatori, ma ieri ho visto un rapporto da Roma in Linea Verde su RaiUno (d'Italia), e sembra che i musei romani possono riaprire, ma si deve prima comprare il suo biglietto sul Internet. E come se lo fa senza uno smartphone quando già sta fuori di qualche museo? Io l'ho comprato biglietti da casa per luoghi come il Palazzo Ducale di Venezia e i musei del Vaticano dove si sa che ci può esserci una fila di diverse centinaia di metri, ma fare la stessa cosa per ogni piccolo museo della città? Impossibile... Il turismo non è semplicemente una questione di farsi brucire come cipolle arrostite su una spiaggia da qualche parte, ma anche di visitare luoghi. Sono fortunato di aver viaggiato in India poco prima della corona, quindi quest'anno non sarà la massima disperazione e tristezza da un punto di vista turistico come si potrei aspettare, ma sarà decisamente meno internazionale degli anni precedenti.

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[Iversen]

EO: Mi ĵus ricevis la revuon Esperanto, kaj kiel la lasta numero ĝi estas markita de nuligoj - inkluzive de la planita Universala Monda Kongreso, kiu devus esti okazonta en Montrealo, Kanado. La venontjara kongreso okazos en Belfasto, Nord-Irlando, sed poste tiam oni atendas reveni al Montrealo.

I didn't sign up for this years gathering in Theresienstadt in Poland, nor for any other language meeting this year. Last year the censorship committee of the gathering rejected my proposal for a speech in Portuguese about translation as a tool in language learning, so I did turn up in Bratislava, but didn't attend to any of the activities at the venue even though I had a valid ticket. I had conversations with several participants, but only outside the control post. Instead I spent my time visiting zoos and museums in Eastern Czechia and Western Slovakia. As for the cancelled meeting in Poland I hadn't signed up so it didn't bother me personally that it got into trouble with the corona pandemy, but of course it is sad for those who had planned to go there.

As for the polyglot conference in Cholula, Mexico, it is a big question whether it can take place as planned - the corona situation in Mexico is somewhat gloomy right now. I haven't visited Cholula since 1991 so if the situation seems to be OK I can't exclude that I sign up, but as late as possible - one reason being that I didn't propose a speech so I have one reason less to come. I also skipped the previous conference in Japan because its focus was on Asian languages, which isn't exactly my strongest point, and I had other travel plans while the conference in Ljubljana the year before took place so Reykjavíkur 2017 was actually that last time I participated in a polyglot conference. For some reason I hadn't applied for the privilege to do a lecture there, but I used the occasion to get some training in speaking Icelandic. But tourism and the local language of the venue isn't enough: If I don't have something to say myself at such an event, I don't feel that I really have a valid reason to be there. Attending as a mere listener is about as non-committal as listening to TED talks on Youtube, only more expensive - and to boot humiliating if you know that you had something relevant to say about languages and/or language learning, but didn't get (or missed) the chance.

EO: La samo por la Esperanta evento en Montrealo - se mi ne rajtas prezenti paroladon, mi ne sentas iun apartan emon partopreni, kaj en la kongresoj de UEA ili favoras enuigajn skribitajn paroladojn legitajn laŭte per monotona voĉo de la aŭtoro (la Scienca Kafejo estas la ĉefa kialo ke mi ankoraŭ kelkfoje subskribas por la kongresoj de UEA). Cetere mi estis en Montrealo antaŭ kelkaj jaroj, sed en Cholulo nur por mallonga vizito en 1991. Ĝis nun la korona situacio en Meksiko ŝajnas iomete sombra, kaj aera transporto el Eŭropo al Cholulo povos esti problemo.

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[slowmoon]

Last year the censorship committee of the gathering rejected my proposal for a speech in Portuguese about translation as a tool in language learning...

I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on translation as a tool in language learning. How and why do you do use translation as a tool? Do you translate L1 to L2 or L2 to L1?

[Iversen]

It will take more than a few lines to answer that question, but for me the central problem with the conception in the old grammar-translation is that translation is seen as a symmetric operation, that is: you get some sentences in your base language and translate them into your target language, and then you get some sentences in your target language and translate them into your base language - and if you are really good your teacher will accept both translations. But the point is that the prettiest translations aren't necessarily those that teach you the most.

Let's take target language-to-base language first. You mostly make such translations for the benefit of people who couldn't be bothered to learn the foreign languages themselves. They expect you to keep the meaning intact and if possible also the structure of the narrative or argumentation, and the text must appear as it it was written in the base language from the start. However they don't really care whether the grammar was changed along the way, they may also accept that you adapt some references to institutions and idiomatic expressions must be found that respect the 'gist' rather than the literal meaning of the original expressions. There is a fairly large literature about the problems faced by translators that do this kind of translations, but this literature doesn't really address the problems of a newbee learner.

I remember that I was lauded by a teacher during my French studies for translating "une revolution qui se cherche" into "en revolution der famler sig frem" in Danish (roughly 'a revolution that gropes its way forward'). The gist has been preserved, but definitely not the logic of the original expression (which should be 'a revolution that searches itself''). She was happy, but I felt that I had cheated.

For me you need to operate with a three level system for translations in this direction, where you first understand exactly what the original expression actually says - best illustrated with a hyperliteral translation - and after that you can add a 'free' translation where you find idiomatic ways to express the original thoughts. And level two and three are often very different. One thing to notice here is that idiomatic expressions typically aren't incomprehensible as sometimes claimed - there is mostly some kind of logic behind them, but just not any kind of logic you could have guessed.

So hyperliteral translations (or word-to-word translations) are actually the ones that are closest to illustrating how native speakers actually think in their language, whereas the kind of 'pretty translations' teachers expect from you are those you need to impress those readers that can't read the original versions.

But 'pretty translations' are based on a task you face when producing translation in the opposite direction, from your base language to a target language, namely finding ways to communicate thoughts you have in the base language into idiomatic foreignese formulations. And here the grammar and morphology and etymology of things in your base language are totally irrelevant - you are supposed already to master your base language to perfection. So here the problem with idiomatic expressions is that hyperliteral translations have to be used in another way: you can use them as calques which help you to remember the expressions of the target language, but once these have been learnt, the crutch should be discarded. In the direction from base language to target language you need to build a store of standardized ways to express specific ideas from your own mind into something a native speaker of your target language might have thought in a similar situation. And you have to do this in ways that respect the grammatical rules of the target language.

I could here point to a situation with my Latin dictionaries. The old Romans had other thought patterns and different semantic structures than modern people, but some dictionaries from something-into-Latin seem to be constructed simply by inverting the direction of a dictionary from Latin into that other language. That's NOT what I need: I want a dictionary where I easily can look things up that occurs in MY mind - and not in the mind of Julius Cesar. OK, then the dictionary may have to indicate what the Romans actually did then they had to express such things, and then I learn how they coped with such thought patterns.

So when studying a text in a foreign language you have to think in patterns that are as close to the logic of the target language, and then you may - or may not - choose to translate that stream of thoughts into something palatable for readers that haven't bothered to learn that language but still expect something pretty that isn't too far from the message of the original text. However this second task is NOT really part of your duties as as a language learner.

However if you want to learn to think and write in a foreign language using the logic inherent in that language then your main duty when working with translations should be is to identify and remember idiomatic equivalents in the target language to anything you might want to express in your base language. And one day you know enough of those pretty expressions to cut the umbilical chord back to the base language.

Some learners claim they learn each new language from scratch. OK, we all want to end up in a situation where we don't need any reference back to some base language when we express ourselves in the target language. And for some the best way may indeed be to start with a tiny store of words and expressions which they then push and extend and push and extend until they can move freely around inside a large bubble within the confines of the foreign language. Others use elements from their base language (or languageS) as some kind of scaffolding to build their skills in the target language - and that's where I belong. But the scaffold should follow the structures of the foreign language and not those of your own base language.

And almost as an afterthought: I have a simple rule: I use my base languages freely in the form of dictionaries and translations when I study intensively, but try to avoid them when doing extensive activities like reading or listening .. or speaking and writing, for that matter. So when I study texts I find it positively nauseating to be restricted to extremely simple and boring pedagogical texts, but it is only via the use of reasonably literal bilingual texts that I can proceed fast to more interesting materials. My bubble is large from an early point in time, but it takes a long time time before I learn to swin freely around within it.

OK ... many words, and I hope they add up to some kind of explanation of what I had intended to say in Bratislava last year.

[Iversen]

I have spent most of this week at my mother's place, where the garden was growing like mad. Just to give a hint of the size of the task I have moved 14 wheelbarrows full of weeds and hedge cuttings (or whatever that stuff is called) to her compost heaps. My biggest worry with that garden is actually that the compost mountains doesn't seem to disintegrate at the same speed as I add new stuff on top of them so eventually we'll have to dig holes and access the house through tunnels from the road outside. And yes, you are allowed to take garden refuse to the recycling station, but we don't have a trailer plus a car that could drag it away with all the rubbish, and I have not tried to drive around (let alone go astern) with such a contraption. And there isn't space enough in the garden to burn the whole thing in one ginormous blaze.

Under those circumstances it is hard to study, but I did actually finish the repetitions of my Polish wordlists from A to C. And of course I also watched TV in German and Swedish and Norwegian in the evenings. After I returned home yesterday I added most of the letter D to the wordlists (well, selected words only, of course - not everything from my thick green Pons), and I expect to reach the end of D today. And then I can do the repetitions tomorrow where the weather forecast spells rain. Besides I studied something like a full page from my Greek text about the Semitic languages in the old days.

GR: Το κείμενο αναφέρεται σε διάφορες παραλλαγές της Χανααναϊκής γλώσσας, στην φοίνική και μωαβιτική, στην εβραϊκή γλώσσα και τη αντικαταστατικής της, η αραμαϊκή. Πρόκειται για μια παλαιότερη δίγλωσση εκτύπωση με δανική μετάφραση, αλλά τα ελληνικά μου έχουν φτάσει σταδιακά σε ένα επίπεδο στο οποίο θα μπωρώ κατ 'αρχήν να κάνω χωρίς τη μετάφραση - και δεν χρησιμοποίησα χθες ένα λεξικό (υπάρχουν μερικές λέξεις που θα ήθελα να ελέγξω, αλλά μπορώ να το κάνω όταν μεταφέρονται τις λέξεις σε μια λίστα λέξεων). Και δεν μπορεί να αποκλειστεί ότι πηγαίνω στην χειμώνα σε ένα ελληνικό νησί - για παράδειγμα στην Κρήτη, την οποία επισκέφθηκα τελευταία φορά το 1987. Δεν χρειάζομαι ζεστό νερό κολύμβησης, αλλά φυσικά τα μουσεία και οι ανασκαφές πρέπει να είναι ανοιχτά. Και σ'αυτό το καλοκαίρι θα είμαι στη Δανία.

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[Iversen]

Today I have written a wordlist with almost 400 Polish words, and I have studied the last part of my text in Slovak about the Spiš castle - but I have also watched television, including the BBC quiz Pointless, where the point is to choose answers which as few as possible among a panel of 100 Brits knew. And I mention this here because the level of knowledge among some (or rather 'most') contestants of things outside their own island (or time) isn't always perfect. I still remember that only something like 13 out of 100 in the panel knew mrs. Merkel from Germany - knowledge of popstars and football players seems to be more widespread. And the last time I watched the program there was a question about the French revolutionary who was stabbed in his bath by a friendly lady named Charlotte Corday (Correct answer: Marat). Two teams made guesses: one contestant proposed that the victim might be Jeanne d'Arc, the other that it was Napoleon. OK, if somebody asked me about British footballers I might come up with answers that were just as idiotic...

SLK: Z nejakého neznámeho dôvodu som zistil slovenský text pomerne ťažké, ale riešením je najprv prebojujte sa cez to - a potom ním prejsť ešte raz, kde by ste mu mali byť schopní porozumieť ním nielen to pitvať jedno slovo naraz. V inom vlákne sme nedávno diskutovali o pojme "zrozumiteľné vstup" a navrhol som, že dvojjazyčné texty sú dobrým spôsobom, ako zrozumiteľnejšie texty (i + 1). Ak je text i + 7, potom je priskoro na to použitie, ale ak je to i + 2 alebo i + 3, potom stačí jednu cestu cez strojom. Mám aj ďalšie kritérium: ak je môj zoznam neznámych slov na pravom okraji dlhší ako text, text je potrebné znova preskúmať.

Spišski Hrad (alebo jeho zrúcanina) sa nachádza pri ceste do Prešov a Košíc, ale čo urobí? Prišiel som vlakom.

Spišski Hrad.jpg

FR: Marat était d'ailleurs l'un des personnages plus fanatiques de la révolution française - un démagogue qui n'a cessé de inciter la fureur des groupes plus sanguinaires parmi la population. Mais il était aussi victime d'une maladie chronique de la peau (peut-être dermatitis herpetiformis) qui l'a forcé à rester des heures dans une baignoire. Et c'est là que Charlotte Corday l'a tué. D'ailleurs je me demande un chose: aurait-il été un peu plus amical si sa peau ne le démangeait pas tellement?

NO: Selvfølgelig er det flere malere som har skildret episoden, og de fleste har vist en død Marat i badekaret - mere eller mindre forskjønnet. Men den norske maler E.Munch brukte bare drapet som et billigt påskudd for å vise en splinternaken mann og en ditto kvinne og noke frukt på ei bord - som om Corday hadde kasta klærne sine før hun kom inn i Marats bolig. Kvar er kniven? Kvar er badekaret? Hvor er Corday hennes klær? Etter min mening representerer dette kunstnerisk frihet som har gått over streken!

Marat.jpg

[slowmoon]

Today I have written a wordlist with almost 400 Polish words

I read in your guide that, with your three-column method, you now do one review instead of two because you found that the second review didn't add much more retention. What do you think about doing 0 reviews and just moving on to new words? Let's say that learning with 0 reviews has a 50% forgetting rate (one month later). And let's say that doing one review 1-2 days later reduced it to a 15% forgetting rate. If you could add 400 new words in the same amount of time that it took to review the 400 original words (and of course forget 50% of the new words), you would learn 400 total Polish words out of 800 instead of 340 out of 400. Of course, all those assumptions are made up. In reality, reviewing the words would be much faster than adding new words. Any thoughts?