Mick oppii suomea - Mick learns Finnish

[mick33]

I don't know if HTLAL will be back, so this is my log. I will write about, and often in Finnish, Spanish, Afrikaans and Swedish, but at first mostly Afrikaans and Spanish since I could write in those languages a few years ago. In my earlier logs I would translate my foreign language posts into English, but that took too much time so I won't do that here. I always give in to language wanderlust so you will see posts about Italian, Hungarian, Polish, Thai, Hindi and any other language that may interest me but I will make an effort to stay more focused than I have in the past.

7/11/17 EDIT: I'm now focusing on Finnish and Hungarian. This matters now because after two years I finally have something to write here!

20/9/18 EDIT: I guess I can claim I'm focused on learning Finnish and Polish right now, but the other languages mentioned in this log's new title aren't being ignored so the most important word is probably et cetera.

6/4/20 EDIT: I am learning Finnish now, so I changed my log's name. I will continue with other languages too, but mostly this log will be about Finnish from now on.

[mick33]

I've been thinking about how I learn languages. I know I wrote about this before in my old logs but I've made some changes.

I think of language learning as having three parts

• Listening
• Speaking
• Reading/Writing

These parts are connected, but for me listening always comes first. When I hear a language for the first time I will think that it sounds beautiful or exotic or maybe mysterious but really it just sounds like noise. I want to get past this noise phase and eventually understand the words and phrases being used. I like to start listening to songs but I also use radio broadcasts, TV shows and movies.

Speaking starts with learning the alphabet even when the language uses the Roman alphabet I want to know about unique letters or sounds I wouldn't expect. Pronunciation comes next but it could start anytime from the first day to a year later but I've never waited a year and I probably won't.

Speaking also includes vocabulary, I have to know what to say to practice pronunciation, but I usually start by singing along with the songs I'm listening to at the moment. I learn phrases, sentences and some individual words by first trying to pick out things I hear repeated frequently such as the words in a song's chorus. I used to learn more individual words but in the last few years I've decided to learn mostly phrases and sentences. The individual words I do learn are often verbs that I know I'll use a lot like "to be", "to know", "to go", "to do", "to want" and "can" . This is a little bit of grammar but one change is that I no longer focus so much on it since I have finally learned that using a grammar-heavy approach in the early phase of language learning distracts me too much and prevents me from actually using the language.

Ideally, listening never stops since I believe that if I am serious about learning a language well I need to hear people speak it, but I haven't quite done All Japanese All The Time-style immersion consistently. I don't worry about how many hours or minutes I spend listening to anything, because I'm not good with mathematics, therefore I just listen a lot.

Reading/Writing come later since I consider them intermediate or advanced level activities. Just like with speaking I don't really have time frame for starting to read or write, I just attempt these things when I think it seems right. I like to find simple books and articles to read at first but since my main source of reading material is the internet that doesn't always work.

Now I'll also add a few things about fluency. I know I've written about fluency before (though I can't remember where exactly so I won't try to find it) but I was very concerned about being fluent; i.e. What does it mean to be fluent? How quickly can I get there? How many words must I know before I can claim fluency and so on....but no one can seem to agree on anything about fluency excepting maybe the CEFR scale. After reading some of the seemingly endless debates on HTLAL about what fluency means and seeing no resolution, I don't care that much about fluency per se anymore. If I ever do think I need to describe my level in a language I'll probably use the CEFR scale. I will not guess my level in any language I'm learning right now, my unplanned break from the forum and language learning last year (family emergencies) means that I have forgotten most of what I learned. I will claim that as of right now, my level in Finnish, Spanish, Afrikaans, Swedish and maybe also Italian is false beginner and that I'll just start from the beginning if I actually decide to learn any Hungarian, Polish, Hindi or Thai.

I've typed too much English for one day, so I'm going to listen to some Finnish music and then read something in Spanish before I go to bed.

Buenas noches
Hyvää yötä
Mick

[mick33]

Ek sal eerste afrikaans hier skryf. Ek het afrikaanse woordeskat en grammatica(of taalkunde) hersien. Ek kan inderdaad die woord orde onthou maar dit lyk asof ek baie woorde vergeet. Môre sal ek spaans en sweeds skryf.

Lekker slaap
Mick

[Jar-Ptitsa]

Ek sal eerste afrikaans hier skryf. Ek het afrikaanse woordeskat en grammatica(of taalkunde) hersien. Ek kan inderdaad die woord orde onthou maar dit lyk asof ek baie woorde vergeet. Môre sal ek spaans en sweeds skryf.

Lekker slaap
Mick

Grappig hoe het Afrikaans erg gemakkelijk is om te lezen wanneer je Nederlands kent.

[mick33]

Dag vogeltje, en welkom !

Grappig hoe het Afrikaans erg gemakkelijk is om te lezen wanneer je Nederlands kent.

Is jy seker? Ek dink dit nie 'n verrassing is nie, want ons ken Afrikaans en Nederlands baie gelyk (of gelijken) is.

[mick33]

I fredags jag skrev

Môre sal ek spaans en sweeds skryf.

men i stället jag klippa mig håret själv forra lördag. Jag tyckte jag skulle aldrig vilja en snagg til två månader sedan. I juni jag gick til frisören* två gånger men $17 varje två veckor ska bli dyr.

Varför skriver jag inte spanska här? Jag har glömt så mycket spansk grammatik och ordförråd. Det är obegripligt för mig. Jag var säkert att jag visste mera spanska än svenska. Nu måste jag lära mig spanska igen.

Hej då
Mick

*på engelska jag ska säga "I walked" för att jag har ofte gått til frisören.

[Jar-Ptitsa]

Dag vogeltje, en welkom !

Grappig hoe het Afrikaans erg gemakkelijk is om te lezen wanneer je Nederlands kent.

Is jy seker? Ek dink dit nie 'n verrassing is nie, want ons ken Afrikaans en Nederlands baie gelyk (of gelijken) is.

Dag mick. Dankjewel

we hebben op htlal vaak 'gesproken' voordat ze me weer hadden verbannen. Wat leuk dat het hier veel vriendelijker is.

Ik bedoelde niet dat ik verbaasd was, meer dat het leuk is.

groetjes

[mick33]

Escribo español

Nu måste jag lära mig spanska igen.

Sí, aprendí español, pero he estado aprendiendo polaco y húngaro. No escribo polaco o húngaro ahora porque no sé bastante palabras.

chau
Mick

[mick33]

I guess I could call this a reboot of my log, but I'd rather think of this as picking up where I left off two years ago.

In the language nerd thread I wrote

The other day someone on Pinterest left a comment on of my pins that read "I dare you to learn Hungarian" and I replied "Magyarul tanulok!" (I am learning Hungarian). Unfortunately, I proved I don't know much Hungarian when I could not respond to the question "és nehéz?" in Hungarian !! Of course, I now must learn for certain what exactly "és nehéz? means. Naturally, I'll use this experience as motivation to improve my limited Hungarian.

I now have two obvious questions to answer:

What does "és nehéz mean?

Mick, do you know how to respond this question in Hungarian?

I can definitely answer the first one by telling you that "és" means "and". I think "nehéz means "hard" or "difficult" according to the Sztaki Szótár online dictionary.

If only I could answer the second question so easily. I know that in Hungarian "igen" is "yes" and "nem" would probably be "no", and that's a good start. Yet I'm not satisfied with this, to give a proper response I would want to explain briefly why I think Hungarian is, or maybe is not, hard to learn. Yes I will answer that question, but not until I know how to write it in Hungarian . This should give me a reason to write something here soon.

Jó éjszakát
Mick

[mick33]

Mick, do you know how to respond this question in Hungarian?

If only I could answer the second question so easily. I know that in Hungarian "igen" is "yes" and "nem" would probably be "no", and that's a good start. Yet I'm not satisfied with this, to give a proper response I would want to explain briefly why I think Hungarian is, or maybe is not, hard to learn. Yes I will answer that question, but not until I know how to write it in Hungarian . This should give me a reason to write something here soon.

Jó éjszakát
Mick

Sziasztok! It's been almost a month since my last post here, and I hope I've learned a little more Hungarian. I thought a good place to start would be working on answering the second question I posed above. Answering questions means I need to know more words than I knew a month ago, words like think, opinion, and to believe. According to Szotar Sztaki and Wiktionary, some good Hungarian words to know are gondol (to think something), vélemény (opinion), hisz (to believe), vél (to think or to opine) and szerint (I think it means according to, as in according to me).

Of course to actually use any of these words I also need to know what conjugations and suffixes are required because almost every word inflects, (or maybe declines? ) but I'll leave that topic for later.

viszlát!
Mick