kunsttyv's Spanish, Persian, Esperanto

[kunsttyv]

Hello everybody. Long time lurker over at the old forum here. Since I got more serious about language learning lately, I figured it was best to do like other people do and create a log. I'll use this log as a place to gather information about my own learning process, but also to gather links to various learning material, articles, tips & tricks that I come across. I feel like much of what I've read with interest in the past have been lost because I didn't care to keep the link.

I don't really have much experience with learning languages. At school I studied English, German and French as foreign languages, but English came to me almost through osmosis, I can barely remember ever having studied it, and the other two are long gone. The good thing is that this place abounds with people who know how to study languages, so hopefully I can draw on other people's trials and errors to make my own learning more effective. Tentative plans for the languages I set out to study are given below.

Spanish

• Approach: One lesson a day of Assimil, supplemented with subs2srs when I find the time to set it up, and possibly FSI since people say it's such a good course.
• Motivation: I'm something of a false beginner in Spanish, having once taken some language classes during a one-month trip to Panama. It has long been the language I desire to read/speak the most, in part due to my love of Latin American literature. I've read authors like Borges, Bolaño and Cortázar extensively, but always in translation, and it would be great to be able to throw away that extra filter between them and me. I also have access to an apartment in the south of Spain, which I will hopefully make use of many times in the coming years, and I've promised myself that it is totally out of the question to go there and speak English.
• Goal: Be able to function/survive in Spanish when I go to Spain during the first week of November, i.e. three months from now. More long term would I like to get to a level where I could enjoy Spanish language literature in the original.

Persian

• Approach: book2 + Anki.
• Motivation: Persian is to my ears the most beautiful language in the world. I think it even carries over to the accents of Iranians speaking other languages. Iranian cinema is really good, with people like عباس کیارستمی (Abbas Kiarostami), محسن مخملباف‎ (Mohsen Makhmalbaf), فروغ فرخزاد (Forough Farrokhzad) and اصغر فرهادی (Asghar Farhadi) doing/having done great stuff. The script is beautiful, and I think learning it will in itself help to have a more clear sight of this whole region where some variation of the Arabic script is used.
• Goal: Learn the alphabet and basic vocabulary in context with book2. Have fun, enjoy the aesthetics of the language.

Esperanto

• Approach: Fooling around with Duolingo.
• Motivation: Have an easy language to dabble with in between the more serious study of Spanish and Persian. In fact, Esperanto is what made me motivated to finally have a go at the other two recently, because language learning with Esperanto has been fun and pleasurable.
• Goal: No particular long term goal. Short term goal is to finish the Duolingo tree.

More to come in the days ahead.

[kunsttyv]

Persian

I have started to use book2 for Persian in conjunction with Anki, and so far it seems like it works pretty well. I'm starting to get comfortable with the alphabet and the sounds and rhythm of the language. What I did was to write a web scraping script which generated cards from the first 30 book2 lessons. If I want the remaining 70 lessons, it will cost me some money, but I'm pretty sure I'll pay for it when I have exhausted my current deck. The 30 lessons resulted in 540 cards with the following layout.



Here the top field is the category of the lesson, the middle field is the quiz, and the bottom field is the translation (in Norwegian) and also a romanization of the quiz sentence. Tap the middle of the card, and it will sound like this. I have disabled auto play sound, so I'm able to try to pronounce it correctly before I hear the answer. Some of the cards make little sense to me, so I have taken emk's advice from an old post to heart: just throw it away. Hence I have set my iphone to suspend cards whenever I shake it, which gives me a tiny bit of satisfaction every time I have to admit, like I say get the hell out of here card.

Now it would be wonderful if I found an easy way to look up individual words. I still don't have enough grasp of the Persian grammar to always discern which word is which compared to the translation. For instance I think the verb comes last in most of the cards I have reviewed so far, but I am not sure. There's a "define" command on my iphone to look up words, but it seems like Persian is missing from the dictionary list, see the images below.



Someone know whether it's possible to add a custom dictionary to this list? If not, in any case, what's a good Persian - English dictionary for iphone?

One more thing: since the vowels aren't written out in Persian (except for alef ا and the very strange letters و and ﯼ which seem like they are pronounced in a different way every time I see them), I have a really hard time to predict the pronunciation of words without a lot of alefs in them. Are there any concrete guidelines here, or do I just have to memorize the vowels for every word?

[daegga]

Persian
If I want the remaining 70 lessons, it will cost me some money, but I'm pretty sure I'll pay for it when I have exhausted my current deck.

It doesn't have to.
Compare:
http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/NO/NOFA/NOFA085.HTM
http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/FA/FANO/FANO085.HTM

Same lesson, just without the romanization of the Persian script.
The lessons are the same irrespective of the language pair, so if you want to scrape the romanization too, choose some uncommon first language, eg. Slovene
http://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/SL/SLFA/SLFA085.HTM

[kunsttyv]

Thanks a lot daegga! Seems like I move at a rate of about one lesson a day, so in a month I'll need to expand the deck with the remaining lessons.

Spanish

I have finished week 2 of Assimil now (Spanish with Ease, 2nd generation), and I can't say I like it that much. There's no continuous narrative between the lessons, and some of them are even pure grammar drills, like yo estoy contigo, tú estas cansada, hoy está ocupado and so on. Really unengaging stuff. The last lesson was a little bit better though, so I'm going to have some patience and see what next week brings.

While I was out running today, I listened to the tapes from the original course (Spanish without Toil), and it seemed very interesting, judging from the parts I was able to decipher. I'm going to try to do both courses simultaneously, starting on Monday, adding one lesson each day, and reviewing six of the previous ones.

Does someone have experience with the newest Assimil course for Spanish? These are the ones I have at my disposal, but I'm pretty sure I won't have time to use more than two of them simultaneously:

[Expugnator]

Gratulerer med å ha valget persisk! Det er et veldig interessant språk! Jeg gleder meg til å se hva som foregår med book2 og andre materialer. Jeg brukte book2 til georgisk og estisk selv. Lykke til!

Apropo, hvorfor Chico Buarque som avatar?

[kunsttyv]

Hei Expugnator! Jeg har Chico som avatar fordi han er min favoritt blant alle MPB-stjernene fra 60-/70-tallet. Forresten så ligner du ikke så rent lite på Chico selv, ut ifra profilbildet ditt å dømme, hehe.

Var book2 det første du brukte for å lære georgisk? Siden persisk er ganske fremmed både når det gjelder alfabet, uttale og vokabular, så sliter jeg litt med å velge hva jeg skal fokusere på når jeg går igjennom kortene. Hittil har jeg fokusert på bokstaver og uttale, og har ikke klart å plukke opp så mange ord. Når jeg får til uttalen før jeg hører innspillingen, så føler jeg nesten at jeg har fått til kortet, selv om jeg ikke vet hva det betyr.

Veldig bra norsk forresten. To tomler opp!

[Expugnator]

Jo, Jo! Folk på jobben pleier å si at jeg ligner på Chico Buarque. Er du interessert i det portugisiske språk også eller bare i musikken?

Book2 var akkurat en av de første "metoden" jeg brukte for å lære georgisk. Jeg er ikke sikker på at jeg gjorde min best med den, men det hjalp meg likevel. Med estisk var jeg litt mer vant til den. Jeg synes det er bedre å bruke book2 som SRS enn å lære en leksjon hver dag, fordi det finnes mange setninger på leksjonene og man klarer ikke å lære alt på en dag. Jeg avgjør det selv om jeg ikke bruker SRS selv.

[kunsttyv]

Er veldig interessert i det portugisiske språk, det er faktisk et av de vakreste språkene jeg vet om, og jeg er glad i forfattere som Fernando Pessoa og Clarice Lispector, men må prøve å fokusere på spansk først, ellers er jeg redd det bare blir rot.

Det blir spennende å se hvor langt jeg kommer med book2 for persisk. Har planer for hva jeg kan fortsette med etterpå, men inntil videre har jeg mer enn nok med å få gjort unna den daglige dosen med Anki-kort.