Saim's log 2017-2019

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby הענט » 2017-05-13, 7:00

Sorry for the OT, but I want to add my two cents. The Roma in the Czech Republic are viewed overall negatively. But the two extremes of people who put them on a pedestal and the ones who are shouting "g@s the gypsies" are both rare.

The most usual sentiment is that 99% (95-99%) of Roma don't work, lie and steal, sell drugs and give birth just to get more welfare. So many people think this covertly and many people say it. Sometimes they expect that it's a common knowledge and everybody shares this sentiment. Which is not true. Roma live in their own neighborhoods, but also in mixed neighborhoods. Many work (but are perceived as the one %) and there are some interracial couples or marriages.

As for the antigypsyism correlation to other forms of xenophobia, it varies. The far right neo-nazis hate everyone. But many people say this racist quote : "I'm not racist, but I don't like gypsies". We had an Egyptian in our class a few years ago recounting how a local girl upon finding out he wasn't Roma dragged him into the bathroom and wanted to have sex wih him.
Ofc it was a shock for a Muslim guy gtowing up in Egypt, but it also shows how people differentiate between Roma and foreigners.

Yet Roma people win Czech Idol or other reality shows. For example Vladko Dobrovodský has won Vyvolení (chosen ones) twice. And he's a gay Roma, so you know it depends.

I think the key is to have more mixed schools. I grew up with both Roma and Vietnamese and never had problems with anybody. And while some of the steretypes are true, it may as well be a result of the prejudice they're facing. Can't find a job, sell meth instead.


Sorry for the OT

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby הענט » 2017-05-13, 7:45

Saim: btw. ja paňimáju is typical heavy accented Russian. People who had to learn Russian in school usually don't know much.

I imagine they had some native tutors, but usually older people have strange almost incomprehensible accent. The same goes for English - fůt = food, vizaut = without, jůťůb - YouTube .

Vowels are usually what gives an average Czech problems, but sometimes even consonants.

My mom speaks better German than me in terms of grammar and vocab, but merges ä, e and ö into one e sound.


I have always wanted to learn Lebanese Arabic, but I guess I'll have to settle for Syrian, because the only resources I can think of is the book by Maksoud Feghali and Assimil Libanais de poche.

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby voron » 2017-05-13, 11:53

Dr. House wrote:I have always wanted to learn Lebanese Arabic, but I guess I'll have to settle for Syrian, because the only resources I can think of is the book by Maksoud Feghali and Assimil Libanais de poche.

But then, you don't have much for Syrian either. Basically there is only the "Syrian Arabic: The Functional Course", and the military courses - DLI and FSI.

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby voron » 2017-05-13, 12:07

Saim wrote:Turkish

Found subtitles for the first episode of Mühteşem Yüzyıl. I think I'll go through chunks of the subtitles for reading practice (marking new words) and then listen to the audio along with my notes. Once I've studied the whole thing I'll listen to it on my phone in the gym/shopping/whatever.

Do you enjoy Muhteşem Yüzyıl at all? I found it so boring that I couldn't watch more than 30 minutes of it. Also the vocabulary isn't really the most useful unless you want to learn a few Ottoman words.

This is the series I enjoyed the most:
Bir Kezban Bir Mahmut - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJWLSRt9ENU

If you want to have something with subtitles, I cannot recommend this website more:
http://engelsiz.kanald.com.tr/

All the shows there are subtitled in Turkish (for the hearing-impaired). There is a slight nuisance that they also include verbal descriptions of non-conversation scenes, and a sign language interpretation, but If you fiddle with the underlying HTML a bit, you can download a subtitle file separately, so you can watch the 'clean' video elsewhere.

I liked these shows:
Ankara'nın Dikmen'i
Güneşi beklerken
Ben bilmem eşim bilir - a game show
Last edited by voron on 2017-05-13, 13:49, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-05-13, 13:04

I'm not sure I even have enough patience for a TV series in general, so I tend to prefer movies, with the following exceptions:

There's a Pakistani series (in Urdu, without subtitles) called "Larka Karachi Ka Kuri Lahore Di," which seems pretty good and a lady I knew in grad school strongly suggested I watch, but I haven't watched much of it.

There's also a Cambodian series (with English subtitles but in Khmer!) called "Airwaves" in English and I think [raˈlɔːk somˈleːŋ] in Khmer that I watched the first 14 out of 50 episodes of a few years ago (maybe in 2012?) when I was working with my dad, but he shamed me for it, so I stopped. It used to annoy me for appearing to be so similar to American series (it didn't feel very original to me), but the episodes also kept ending with cliffhangers, so... :lol: Maybe someday, I'll watch the whole thing.

There's also Hélène et les garçons in French with subtitles in French, which I saw a few episodes of, plus some telenovela in Mexican Spanish whose name I forgot about drug trafficking and Cidade dos Homens in Brazilian Portuguese with subtitles in English, each of which I think I've seen one episode of (maybe I've seen more of the Mexican one but idr), and Caminho das Índias, a Brazilian telenovela (in Portuguese, of course) with subtitles in Portuguese, which I've seen half an episode of. I'm also kind of considering a Brazilian series called Xica, which I know of only because it was translated into Spanish and aired on a Spanish-language TV channel here called Telemundo.
Dr. House wrote:Sorry for the OT

Not at all, thanks! It's good to know your perspective on these things. :)

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby Saim » 2017-05-13, 14:18

voron wrote:Do you enjoy Muhteşem Yüzyıl at all? I found it so boring that I couldn't watch more than 30 minutes of it.


I watched maybe a dozen episodes of the Urdu dub (just to clarify they were 40 minutes each, if YouTube is anything to go by the original Turkish version seems to have longer episodes, so they must have cut them up for Pakistani TV). It looked good in comparison to some of the Pakistani dramas I was trying to watch, but it wasn't great either. :lol:

I doubt I'll really get into the series, I'll probably just go over the first episode (which is the only one that seems to have subtitles anyway, and I've already seen it so I can focus on the language rather than the plot).


This is the series I enjoyed the most:
Bir Kezban Bir Mahmut - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJWLSRt9ENU


I liked these shows:
Ankara'nın Dikmen'i
Güneşi beklerken
Ben bilmem eşim bilir - a game show


Thanks for the recommendations, I'll know what to move onto when I'm inevitabely bored of Muhteşem Yüzyıl.

If you want to have something with subtitles, I cannot recommend this website more:
http://engelsiz.kanald.com.tr/

All the shows there are subtitled in Turkish (for the hearing-impaired). There is a slight nuisance that they also include verbal descriptions of non-conversation scenes, and a sign language interpretation, but If you fiddle with the underlying HTML a bit, you can download a subtitle file separately, so you can watch the 'clean' video elsewhere.


Brilliant, thanks! I haven't been able to bring myself to study the İstanbul textbook for over a weak now so maybe if I do some native media for a bit the motivation will come back to me.

vijayjohn wrote:I'm not sure I even have enough patience for a TV series in general, so I tend to prefer movies,


I find it harder to bring myself to watch films! :shock: I mean, films are longer, right?

vijayjohn wrote:There's a Pakistani series (in Urdu, without subtitles) called "Larka Karachi Ka Kuri Lahore Di," which seems pretty good and a lady I knew in grad school strongly suggested I watch, but I haven't watched much of it.


Oh yeah, I've heard of that one. I don't really need subtitles for Urdu so I'll definitely check it out.

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-05-13, 14:47

Saim wrote:the Urdu dub

Muhteşem Yüzyıl was dubbed into Urdu? :shock:

EDIT: Wait, never mind, you mentioned earlier that it's called Mera Sultan in Urdu and voron correctly identified the Turkish series. Also, I forgot all about the Hungarian series called Abigél that I mentioned on this very thread! Too bad it's no longer available online (especially with English subtitles).
I find it harder to bring myself to watch films! :shock: I mean, films are longer, right?

Well, they're longer than individual episodes of a TV series, but they're not usually longer than a TV series in its entirety! And remember, the one series that I actually watched more than like three episodes of was the one with all the cliffhangers at the end, so it takes much longer to find a stopping point, especially without having to pause in the middle of an episode. :P (Or maybe not really cliffhangers so much as just oddly unresolved issues).
Oh yeah, I've heard of that one.

Probably because I keep mentioning it without ever actually watching it :lol:

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby הענט » 2017-05-16, 6:24

voron wrote:
Dr. House wrote:I have always wanted to learn Lebanese Arabic, but I guess I'll have to settle for Syrian, because the only resources I can think of is the book by Maksoud Feghali and Assimil Libanais de poche.

But then, you don't have much for Syrian either. Basically there is only the "Syrian Arabic: The Functional Course", and the military courses - DLI and FSI.


And about 90 lessons of Pimsleur Eastern Arabic. :)

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby Saim » 2017-05-16, 8:00

I think I need to do more work with my oral comprehension of Russian and French, so I'll do some more intensive listening instead of the extensive listening I've been doing so far. I don't have many problems with texts, but often I can only get the vague gist of audio, so I need to bridge that gap.

French

For French I've been listening to the fourth episode of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I have both the audio and subtitles in French, but the subtitles are quite different to the French dub, so I decided a good exercise would be to try and edit the subtitles so that they match the audio. So far it's been going pretty well, I think (I'm up to 08:23 and I don't think there's any bits I haven't been able to transcribe so far)!

Russian

For Russian I'll try and transcribe parts of an episode of Кухня and then check it against the transcription on 3ears.com. I've watched the entire first seaon, many of the episodes several times, so I hope I won't have too much trouble with it.

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby Saim » 2017-05-29, 5:51

Galician

I just realised that the Galician government offers free monolingual textbooks (pdf + audio) for studying Galician (levels 1, 2, 3 and 4 on the CELGA; equivalent to A2, B1, B2 and C1), so I think I'll probably go through those towards the end of summer, along with native audivisual materials which I'll shadow (I have no trouble understanding the language so my main priority should be developing spoken fluency with a relatively accurate accent and grammar so people don't think I'm speaking weird Spanish or Portuguese). There also have CELGA past papers.

Aula de Galego 1 (A2)
http://www.lingua.gal/recursos/para-apr ... l-alumnado

Aula de Galego 2 (B1)
http://www.lingua.gal/recursos/para-apr ... l-alumnado

Aula de Galego 3 (B2)
http://www.lingua.gal/recursos/para-apr ... l-alumnado

Aula de Galego 4 (C1)
http://www.lingua.gal/recursos/para-apr ... l-alumnado

There was a video competition in Galician called YouTubeir@s (http://youtubeiras.gal/). The entries are all five minutes long so I think that could be something fun to shadow. There are also some documentaries in Galician on Youtube made by Galician public TV.

It seems like there might be more for me to work with online than I expected. :D

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby dEhiN » 2017-05-29, 8:39

Saim wrote:Galician

[...]

It seems like there might be more for me to work with online than I expected. :D

Thanks for the links! After listening to the first 30 seconds of the Youtubeir@s project, which is my first introduction to spoken Galician, my initial thoughts are that it sounds a lot like Spanish with some Portuguese words thrown in! Or perhaps the trilled r is throwing me off and thinking it's like Spanish. Well that, and I'm pretty sure the host/narrator uses [θ].
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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby Saim » 2017-05-29, 9:24

dEhiN wrote:Thanks for the links! After listening to the first 30 seconds of the Youtubeir@s project, which is my first introduction to spoken Galician, my initial thoughts are that it sounds a lot like Spanish with some Portuguese words thrown in!


The accent is definitely closer to Castilian Spanish but if you listen again and pay close attention to the specific words (and contractions like facelo, na, etc.) you'll notice that it's grammatically and lexically closer to Portuguese. Also note that Galician differentiates open and closed e and o like Portuguese (in the first thirty seconds: é, pode, reborden, fora have open vowels).

Or perhaps the trilled r is throwing me off and thinking it's like Spanish.


I'm not sure where I read this but IIRC that there are some rural speakers of Iberian Portuguese in northern Portugal that have the same trilled r for <rr> as Spanish, Catalan and Galician.

Well that, and I'm pretty sure the host/narrator uses [θ].


Yes, in Galician there are three types of θ/s distribution:

Full distinción as in Castilian Spanish; deθ, θinco; lightest shade on the map
Partial distinción (/θ/ is pronounced [s] at the end of a word, [θ] elsewhere); des, θinco; second lightest
Full seseo as in most Spanish; des, sinco; darkest

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-05-29, 12:21

Saim wrote:I'm not sure where I read this but IIRC that there are some rural speakers of Iberian Portuguese in northern Portugal that have the same trilled r for <rr> as Spanish, Catalan and Galician.

Wikipedia says that some varieties of Northern Portuguese have the alveolar trill and that it's "still dominant in rural areas."

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby dEhiN » 2017-05-30, 13:59

Saim wrote:Yes, in Galician there are three types of θ/s distribution:

Full distinción as in Castilian Spanish; deθ, θinco; lightest shade on the map
Partial distinción (/θ/ is pronounced [s] at the end of a word, [θ] elsewhere); des, θinco; second lightest
Full seseo as in most Spanish; des, sinco; darkest

Image

That's interesting how there are two areas of full seseo that are surrounded by full distinción. I'm surprised those areas haven't been affected by those north of it. Although perhaps the (I presume to be) Portuguese speakers to the south affect them?
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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby Saim » 2017-06-01, 23:05

dEhiN wrote:That's interesting how there are two areas of full seseo that are surrounded by full distinción. I'm surprised those areas haven't been affected by those north of it. Although perhaps the (I presume to be) Portuguese speakers to the south affect them?


Perhaps. I think the most likely explanation is that the seseo area was larger in the past, with distinción expanding into it. Except for the northwest, all the seseo areas seem to be little enclaves surrounded by one of the two types of distinción (or both).

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby Saim » 2017-06-01, 23:28

My new study method is to walk around while shadowing lots of audio. I find it easier to concentrate when I'm off my laptop (limits my use of things like forums, YouTube and Facebook) and I feel a lot more energy because I'm not just sitting around in my free time. I find that trying to actively repeat the audio helps the vocabulary stick more than if I just listen, and it's also less boring (although a bit tiring as well). I've noticed my French oral expression is much better than just a week and a half ago, although that may in part be because this method is tailored to my weaknesses in French (good at reading, bad at speaking and listening).

I've been using a lot of Glossika, but mainly just the C files (only in the target language), and I do several files (either half a book or the entire book) in a single sitting rather than doing "a bit every day" (20-100 sentences I think it was) as they recommend. I don't bother with transcribing or recording anything either, nor do I use the spaced repetition system. For Russian and French, I've basically been shadowing the C-files and checking anything I don't understand in the pdf afterwards. With Arabic I think I'll go through the C files first, trying to repeat it all as best I can, and then the A files.

Russian - book 1 done, half of book 2
French - book 1 and 2 done
Arabic - half of book 1 (couldn't succesfully repeat everything though) C files

I've also been doing some Assimil Basque, Assimil Bulgarian and the audio from Aula de Galego 1.

Besides the clearly didactic materials, I've been shadowing native media:

French:
Avatar the Last Airbender dub (two episodes)
highlights from the first-round French presidential debate (20 minutes)
the second round debate in its entirety (Le Pen-Macron)
the first ten minutes from the Royal-Sarkozy debate in 2007
bits of OSS 117: Le Caire: nid d'espions

Russian:
Interview of NAVI Band

Galician:
O GALEGO*NBT

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby Saim » 2017-06-05, 1:21

Basque

Just found out that ikasbil.eus has graded audovisual materials for Basque in its dokuteka! I'm going to start going through some of the A1-level videos. The dialogues seem to be at a natural speed, which is good since I was getting bored of the snail pace Assimil's dialogues (etorri......... eta....... ikusi...... nire.... etxea).

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby Saim » 2017-07-02, 3:28

I've been thinking about my level in some of the languages I have a more advanced/fluent understanding of. I made this graph (because the higher the level the bigger the differences within levels get):

Image

Keep in mind this is all self-assessment and my proficiency may be more or less balanced accross different skills due to the ways I've used these languages over the years.

Serbian
I think my Serbian is closer to C2 than to C1. I used to lose fluency when I would leave Serbia, but now I barely forget anything. I used to think my level of Serbian was closer to what I have in Polish than Catalan or Spanish, but I've realised I can express myself with a level of complexity and precision far beyond that of my Polish (where I still need to use lots of circumlocutions and am not always sure about verbal prefixes and the like). Luckily in Poland I kept using lots of Serbian with Croatian exchange students as well as with Poles who were studying the language at my university, so that's probably why it's steadily improved rather than getting rusty as in other years. One fun thing about talking to Croats in international contexts is that I become 'the Serb'; I remember I met this one girl from Zagreb and she would make fun of my speech not by putting on an American accent, but by throwing bre all over the place. :D

Speaking of, I asked r/Serbia to appraise my accent in Serbian, and here are some of the results:

Top voted:
You sound like someone who's spent a lot of time overseas. It doesn't sound like a single accent, it has various elements, but most of them are close to the standard.

Others:
You sound like a Croat who's spent ten odd years in Vojvodina.
50% gasterbeiter, 50% Serb from Croatia, 100% someone who lives in Vojvodina but isn't originally from there.
Somewhere in the Republic of Srpska?
You're not from Serbia 100%.
Somewhere in Vojvodina bro, can't get more specific.
Maybe Srem, definitely Vojvodina.
When you said "na bregu" it sounded like you were from Vojvodina.

I'm really happy about this because 5 years ago I had a clear Anglophone accent in my Serbian. My mum is from Novi Sad so it's nice to see people identifying something "Vojvodinian" about my speech, even if the last three comments got downvoted. I also remember once a taxi driver asked me if I'm from Subotica (which was what prompted me to do this experiment, I was in shock).

I guess I should just keep reading the language and using it whenever I can, and at some point if I spend some more time in Serbia I'll be at a more solid C2.

Spanish and Catalan
I'd like to get C2 certificates in both these languages over the next year. I remember for a while in my profile I had 4 stars for Catalan and 3 for Spanish because when I was living in Catalonia I hardly ever actually spoke Spanish (though I heard it all the time, and also wrote it a fair bit on the internet). Since then I've spoken a lot of Spanish with Latin Americans and Spaniards I've met in Poland and Australia and I think that my level of oral expression in Spanish is roughly equivalent to that of my Catalan. I'll get the occasional interference from Catalan but in most cases I quickly correct myself (no está "establerto"... establecido). The only things I've had trouble replacing are "quin pal" for "I can't be bothered to" (qué palo in Barcelona Spanish but not widely understood in other regions; "qué pereza" doesn't cut it for me) and "oi tant!" (I've heard Catalan speakers say "¡y tanto!" for in Spanish before but it doesn't seem like the expression is known by 'true' natives even in Castile, let alone Latin America). Also the interrogative que, but I guess that's equivalent to acaso in lots of expressions[1].

It's been fun hanging out with Latin Americans because there have been lots of moments where I used a word that I didn't even know was regional, like piso for apartment (in LA Spanish it means "floor", "ground").

I think it was definitely the right decision to focus on Catalan while living in Catalonia: this originally wasn't a political decision, but a practical one in terms of how to get to an advanced level of Catalan (i.e. speaking it all the time and actively avoiding Spanish and English), although it became a form of activism when I realised how much resistence there is to Catalan in Catalonia. As I suspected I've had ample opportunity to practice Spanish outside of Catalonia, so the people who told me to "learn Spanish first [because it's spoken in Latin America]" (as if I wasn't already at a low B2 level in Spanish when I moved there...) were dead wrong.

[1] An interesting anecdote about this expression: A friend of mine from Catalonia was once staying at a hotel in Castile and it seemed like it was raining. He asked the receptionist "que llueve?" (in Catalan "que plou?" would be something like "it's raining, eh?"/"is it raining? [and I already have some indiciation that it might be raining]", but in Spanish it sounds like "what's raining?"), and the receptionist, perplexed, responded "pues lluvia. qué va a ser, sino?" (um, rain. what else could be raining?).

Urdu

Over the past couple of months I've kind of abandoned Urdu (and Punjabi, for that matter) because I didn't really have a great time in Islamabad. However, I'm glad I spent so much time there and managed to get a much more solid understanding of Urdu. I think I'm knocking on the door to C1, but my level is not balanced as I'm much better at speaking and understanding colloquial Hinglish than reading or writing; I would find it much easier to write an essay in, say, French or Italian than Urdu. To that end I'll get a tutor to help me and focus on writing and the more formal register of Urdu (correcting essays and staging debates about complex or controversial topics rather than just chatting about life and so on). It's also important for me to internalise some of the Perso-Arabic vocabulary so that it'll be easier for me to progress in Arabic and other languages of the Islamic world at a later date (and I can focus on the changes in meaning rather than memorising entirely new lemas; things like Arabic mariiD ill --> Urdu mariiz patient). Once I'm at a more solid C1 level in Urdu I might try and get more familiar with written Hindi and its tatsamas and Sanskritic neologisms.

I'm going to put Punjabi on hold for the time being for practical considerations. Urdu simply has a stronger internet presence, and most written Punjabi from India isn't really that close to vernacular Punjabi as spoken in urban Pakistan, which is the variety I'd like to get more proficient in. For that reason in the long run I think higher-register Urdu will be more useful in understanding Pakistani Punjabi than higher-register Punjabi from India (unfortunately).

Hebrew

This is by far the weakest of my "stronger" languages. I'm extremely lucky I was not only able to keep studying Hebrew while on exchange, but also get into a class that was actually quite a bit above my level (and conducted almost entirely in Hebrew) and follow it for two semesters. At the beginning I couldn't follow much but by the end I get a 96% for spoken expression on the oral exam (some of my other results were more middling but I still passed comfortably).

I don't really have much use for it at the moment, but I really like it and am going to keep working on native media. Thankfully there's a huge wealth of Hebrew media with subtitles in Hebrew, so I really have no excuse! My plan is to do intensive listening once a week (starting after the summer) on some media (i.e. actually studying the Hebrew subtitles, putting words into Anki and so on), then just "enjoy" the language for the rest of the week (more extensive listening, although it's not going to be a huge number of hours per week simply because of the quantity of languages I'm working on). Maybe it'll be hard to juggle with Urdu, but I guess I can just ignore active production (both speaking and writing) for the time being and focus on comprehension and expanding my vocabulary, since I don't really need actively fluent Hebrew for anything.

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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby eskandar » 2017-07-02, 5:26

Saim wrote:I think it was definitely the right decision to focus on Catalan while living in Catalonia: this originally wasn't a political decision, but a practical one in terms of how to get to an advanced level of Catalan (i.e. speaking it all the time and actively avoiding Spanish and English)

And what was your motivation for wanting to learn Catalan in the first place? Was that also practical, in that you were going to be studying in Catalonia and therefore wanted to be fluent in Catalan, or did you choose to study there because you wanted to learn Catalan? Just curious as to how you wound up there to begin with.

To that end I'll get a tutor to help me and focus on writing and the more formal register of Urdu (correcting essays and staging debates about complex or controversial topics rather than just chatting about life and so on).

You should write more here! High-falutin' Urdu is the register I know best so I'd be happy to help if I can.

I'm going to put Punjabi on hold for the time being for practical considerations.

Too bad - I wanted to bug you with another Punjabi song :whistle: It's a poem by Hir Varis Shah. I was able to find the lyrics by Googling (and even an Urdu translation) -- but they didn't seem to correspond to what the singer was actually singing!

since I don't really need actively fluent Hebrew for anything.

I'm also curious about why you started learning Hebrew!
Please correct my mistakes in any language.

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Saim
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Re: Saim's blog 2017

Postby Saim » 2017-07-02, 8:18

eskandar wrote:And what was your motivation for wanting to learn Catalan in the first place? Was that also practical, in that you were going to be studying in Catalonia and therefore wanted to be fluent in Catalan, or did you choose to study there because you wanted to learn Catalan? Just curious as to how you wound up there to begin with.


I wanted to be fluent in Spanish and so was thinking of studying in a Spanish-speaking country. My parents knew people in Barcelona and Alacant, so that's where I applied to. I was aware that Barcelona had two languages, and kind of had this attitude of "the more languages the better!". For whatever reason I expected Catalan to be more vital than it was. I was also interested in sociolinguistics and vaguely thought that promoting minority languages was A Good Thing but nothing too radical, and I had barely heard Catalan before I started looking up music the summer before I went over. :lol: It was kind of random in a way, but also made a lot of sense I guess.


You should write more here! High-falutin' Urdu is the register I know best so I'd be happy to help if I can.


چلو، ضرور لکھوں گا۔ :)

Too bad - I wanted to bug you with another Punjabi song :whistle: It's a poem by Hir Varis Shah I was able to find the lyrics by Googling (and even an Urdu translation) -- but they didn't seem to correspond to what the singer was actually singing!


That's weird. I might give it a shot anyway. :P

I'm also curious about why you started learning Hebrew!


It started with listening to Hadag Nachash, then reading about early Zionism and the different waves of migration to Israel (kind of amazing how Zionism actually "worked" to the extent it did, without justifying the displacement of the Palestinians of course), and finally general interest in the Middle East. Also it was probably the "weirdest" language my university offered as part of their Linguistics degree (well they offered Galician as well but that's at least somewhat understandable in Barcelona). :lol:

Also I kind of identify with the whole Jewish thing of being in exile and not having a homeland, as well as the mixed Central European/Middle Eastern influences that Israel developed after the different waves of immigration.


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