TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-05, 5:09

I think I'm about ready to move on to the German forum. I'm also still excited about the idea of working on all of my languages outside UniLang. I've managed to remember more from some of these languages than I expected (especially Indonesian)! I can even sort of read the Amharic letters now, I think...still have to work on that, though, and not sure whether that means I've made any progress since the last time I mentioned Amharic in this TAC(/PLB ;)) thread.

I've also started thinking about finding movies or YouTube videos to watch in some (most?) of these languages. For Hindi/Urdu, I've already seen a relatively high number of movies compared to any of my other languages (not counting English or Malayalam), so it might actually be more useful for me personally to use LangMedia and learn words from ghazals than to watch Bollywood movies, Indian/Pakistani serials, etc. However, I will say that I find some Bollywood movies more useful than others in this respect. For example, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai seems to me to use fairly simple vocabulary, whereas I doubt that would be the case for, say, Mughal-e-Azam, and I know it's not in Ankur, which in addition to using more complicated vocabulary includes Dakhini-specific usage and next to no English.

EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to add that I've added a bunch of languages to my profile now! I've finally decided to be a bit bolder than I usually am about guessing my proficiency level in a bunch of languages. I've left out some languages that I'm not learning for the time being, though (and included some others even though I'm not learning them at the moment, either). I think the list is big enough as it is right now. :P

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby Michael » 2017-02-05, 8:27

vijayjohn wrote:Oh, and I forgot to add that I've added a bunch of languages to my profile now! I've finally decided to be a bit bolder than I usually am about guessing my proficiency level in a bunch of languages. I've left out some languages that I'm not learning for the time being, though (and included some others even though I'm not learning them at the moment, either). I think the list is big enough as it is right now. :P

I'm glad to finally see a more accurate list! :D
American English (en-us) Neapolitan from Molise (nap) N Italian (it) B2 Spanish (es) Portuguese (pt) French (fr) Greek (el) Albanian (sq) B1 Polish (pl) Romanian (ro) A2 Azerbaijani (az) Turkish (tr) Old English (en_old) A1
„Çdo njeri është peng i veprave të veta.‟
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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby voron » 2017-02-05, 10:52

vijayjohn wrote:so it might actually be more useful for me personally to use LangMedia

Do you happen to know any transcribed videos for Kurmanji Kurdish? :)

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-05, 13:12

Michael wrote:I'm glad to finally see a more accurate list! :D

I'm glad you're glad. :)
voron wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:so it might actually be more useful for me personally to use LangMedia

Do you happen to know any transcribed videos for Kurmanji Kurdish? :)

Not really, but GLOSS has some transcribed audio files.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby dEhiN » 2017-02-05, 13:33

vijayjohn wrote:EDIT: Oh, and I forgot to add that I've added a bunch of languages to my profile now! I've finally decided to be a bit bolder than I usually am about guessing my proficiency level in a bunch of languages. I've left out some languages that I'm not learning for the time being, though (and included some others even though I'm not learning them at the moment, either). I think the list is big enough as it is right now. :P

Quite the impressive list! I didn't realize your French, Mandarin, German, and Spanish are only 3 stars. I figured they were 4 stars for some reason. Also, I love the amount of 2-star languages you have!
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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby voron » 2017-02-05, 16:05

vijayjohn wrote: GLOSS has some transcribed audio files.

Yeah I know about GLOSS. They are all in more or less standard Kurdish. I wish someone made a collection of transcribed audios in dialects. Sadly Kurds themselves are not interested in it. They think having dialects is harfmul for the idea of united Kurdistan.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-06, 2:15

Well, I don't know how much help this is, but I did find these two videos of a Luri song with subtitles both in the original Luri (but with Kurmanji orthography) and in Kurmanji:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-p5OB8gebgk
And this one of a Kurmanji song with subtitles both in Kurmanji and in Persian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgIAlmhEsZk
So far, I don't think I've managed to find anything that isn't a song.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby voron » 2017-02-06, 13:14

Thanks for the songs!

For many Kurdish songs it's in fact quite easy to find their lyrics. On this website there are hundreds, with Turkish translations:
http://kurtcesarkisozu.com/

There are lots of TV series in Kurdish, I wish someone created subtitles for them. I considered contacting Kurdish Institute in Istanbul where I attended the course, with this request, also we had plans creating a course on Duolingo, but a month ago they were closed down by the government, so now their main concern is signing petitions in attempt to re-open it. Yeah sadly things had looked better for the Kurdish language for a few years, but now the pressure is coming back again.

Here is the news telling about the closure:
https://anfenglish.com/culture/kurdish- ... and-sealed

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-06, 13:37

That's too bad, but it's cool that there's a website like that for Kurdish songs complete with a translation! :shock: I don't even know of a website like that for Malayalam. (I know one that has lots of movie songs both in Malayalam script and in Romanized form but definitely not with any sort of translation).

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-11, 6:34

Moved on from the German forum to the Latin forum now. Reading and posting in Latin is always kind of hard because there's just so many words I don't know but need. I'll do it anyway, though, of course. :)

Not much else to report for now, I suppose. Oh, I just remembered that I was toying with the idea of trying to write a transcript of this entire video in all the Indian languages it's in! :P

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-14, 13:30

By now, I've moved on to the Portuguese forum. I don't really have a whole lot more to say than that, I guess. I've started thinking of specific movies to watch in some of my target languages, excluding Hindi since I've seen a bunch of movies in Hindi already and excluding my three- or four-star languages because I don't think they're the ones that will benefit the most from this approach (and I've already seen movies in all of them, too, if only a few in each one other than English or Malayalam). For Portuguese, I might just use the few (short?) European Portuguese movies I've found with subtitles in English and try to come up with a transcript in Portuguese myself. I might also use the Portuguese forum to get help with that.

For other languages I have in mind (Russian, Turkish, BCS, Swahili, Thai - and come to think of it, ASL, Indonesian/Malay, and Tagalog), hopefully, it shouldn't be too hard for me to find movies. In fact, I already know which one I'll use for BCS: The Death of Yugoslavia, which I've been kind of using anyway. For Russian and Turkish, there just seem to be too many choices! For Swahili, there are some neat videos about AIDS and such. :P (Well, it's something!). That leaves Thai, ASL, Indonesian/Malay, and Tagalog. Well, for Tagalog, I suppose there's Pinoy Sunday? Idk. For both Thai and ASL, there should be plenty. For Indonesian/Malay, though...hmm...maybe I should look into that some more. But this is less important for Tagalog, Indonesian/Malay, and ASL than for the others because my level in those three is so low that it could be improved by basically anything at this point.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby voron » 2017-02-14, 13:57

Why do you think watching movies wouldn't be the most beneficial approach for your best languages? What would?

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-15, 1:33

voron wrote:Why do you think watching movies wouldn't be the most beneficial approach for your best languages? What would?

Reading stuff.

Watching movies is helpful up to a point and probably works better for people who are used to, well, watching lots of movies. I am not one of these people. I'm not sure I can stand more than, say, three and a half hours straight in front of a TV (I'm being a little generous here because I'm pretty sure I've seen Hindi movies last almost that long, but they tend to be like, you know, the vast majority of Hindi movies. :P They really try my patience). Also, movies are great for helping you with listening comprehension but not so much for understanding things other than dialogue.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-17, 8:26

So I seem to have found a movie for each of my languages, at least tentatively (this is excluding languages I don't have at least two stars in).

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-18, 23:15

I've moved on to the Spanish forum now. In my last post, I posted I believe six clips of three songs in Spanish. It's kind of weird; I seem to know a lot of songs in Spanish for some reason. It's like the language I know the most songs in is Malayalam, and then it's Hindi after that, and then Spanish of all languages. :shock: That may be partly because Latin American music tends to be much easier for me to relate to than (English-language, US) American music, for example. I learned Spanish songs from maybe one audiocassette my parents happened to buy me, plus "the Spanish channel" (or, more accurately, 2-3 Spanish-language cable TV channels), plus school, plus Encarta, plus UniLang, plus all those efforts of mine to search YouTube mostly for songs in indigenous languages of Latin America where the songs I found turned out to be in Spanish instead. :P

Also, one neat thing I did on the Portuguese forum before that was to try to transcribe a short movie in European Portuguese, and then Luís fixed all my mistakes. :) That's (going to be) really helpful. I really should work some more on Malayalam-related stuff, though.

I think I'll also post some of the movies I mentioned earlier. For Russian, I might use this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLI6EMZtl20
And I'm definitely thinking of using this. It reminds me of American movies like The Parent Trap, which actually kind of makes sense in my brain. Similarly shitty foreign policies, similar movies:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88b1hJVZonM
For Turkish, I might use this? It's a TV series called Zoraki Koca, which is also available in Levantine Arabic (and I've already kind of used that for Levantine Arabic, courtesy of a blog called The Arabic Student):

http://www.zapkolik.com/video/zoraki-ko ... sim-313800

For Swahili, I believe I was thinking of using this, or at least starting out with it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5SYz4s3WjpE
For Thai, I was hoping to use this, actually, but it doesn't seem to be of much use as it doesn't have that much Thai in it. I've seen it a few times already:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bodSHgCtWCc
So I guess I'll look for something else in Thai. Maybe a historical drama or something.

Fortunately, it seems LangMedia has useful resources for all four of these languages. Hopefully, GLOSS does, too.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby dEhiN » 2017-02-19, 6:07

I believe you already mentioned it, but for the languages you're watching movies in, would you consider yourself a beginner or intermediate in? Or to put it another way, are you hoping to understand the movie/video, or to just try and pick out the words and grammar that you know in the language?
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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-19, 6:17

dEhiN wrote:I believe you already mentioned it, but for the languages you're watching movies in, would you consider yourself a beginner or intermediate in?

They're all two-star languages for me, which I guess makes them "intermediate." I think "(upper-?)beginner to lower-intermediate" may be a more accurate designation, though.
Or to put it another way, are you hoping to understand the movie/video, or to just try and pick out the words and grammar that you know in the language?

Neither. I'm hoping at best to pick out words and grammar I don't know or, at the very least, to expose myself to the languages I'm studying beyond the few resources I've been using otherwise.

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby dEhiN » 2017-02-19, 6:28

vijayjohn wrote:Neither. I'm hoping at best to pick out words and grammar I don't know or, at the very least, to expose myself to the languages I'm studying beyond the few resources I've been using otherwise.

Oh that's a cool way of trying to do it! Perhaps I will incorporate that idea into some of my languages.
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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-23, 13:24

I think I'm wrapping up Spanish this time around and getting ready to start on BCS. Speaking of which, I think the reason why I like listening to music in Spanish so much, especially Latin American Spanish, is because it reminds me of Indian music a lot. So much of it is clearly folk or folk-based, and it's so Indian-like when Mexican workers here blare it out of their trucks.

Meanwhile, in addition to posting on language-specific forums and finding and posting songs in minority languages of Europe, just last night, I was thinking some more about what languages I might potentially study in the future. I think one of my colleagues might be a native speaker of Dyula, so maybe I'll feel motivated to start on whatever her language is sooner rather than later; I need to ask her, though (usually, we just talk in French). I also think when doing new Eurasian languages, I might give some more consideration to Hmong-Mien/Miao-Yao languages, Siangic languages, and even Austroasiatic. I could also study Burmese as my next Sino-Tibetan language since it's both an important language (spoken by a large number of people) and hugely different from Chinese. I also found a preliminary(?) grammar of Skou, a language spoken in the Indonesian province of Papua (all its relatives are spoken across the border in Papua New Guinea).

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Re: TAC 2017 - vijayjohn

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-02-24, 18:24

It just occurred to me today that I've been talking about studying all kinds of languages, yet I can see my neighbors' house out the window right where I'm sitting, they speak Teochew and Vietnamese, and I haven't breathed a word about studying either of them.

Meanwhile, I've moved on to the BCS forum, and I'm getting back to working on both my grandfather's diary and Mayura Sandesham this weekend (the latter being an epic poem in a highly Sanskritized and archaic variety of Malayalam I've been trying to memorize).


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