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Luís wrote:Now I'm wanderlusting for them all
linguoboy wrote:Luís wrote:Now I'm wanderlusting for them all
Even Manx?
linguoboy wrote:Ó Siadhail's Speaking Irish still has a lot to recommend it but also a fair bit that makes it hard to use. He teaches one particular dialect, which he speaks natively, and respells some--but not all!--words to match. His phonemic transcriptions are a bit hard to make sense of unless you've read his Modern Irish (which I highly recommend).
vijayjohn wrote:linguoboy wrote:Ó Siadhail's Speaking Irish still has a lot to recommend it but also a fair bit that makes it hard to use. He teaches one particular dialect, which he speaks natively, and respells some--but not all!--words to match. His phonemic transcriptions are a bit hard to make sense of unless you've read his Modern Irish (which I highly recommend).
vijayjohn wrote:When you wrote "Speaking Irish," didn't you mean "Learning Irish"?
Vlürch wrote:Once again, Korean...
...and I finally found out that there actually are Korean-English dictionaries with romanisation (I could swear I searched on Amazon a dozen times before and there never were any until yesterday, wtf), and the two that have the best average rating would together cost only about 40€ so I could buy both of them without losing sleep... and there's only one left of one of them and it doesn't even say "more on the way" or whatever, so... ugh, the temptation to just order both is pretty intense and it would motivate me to actually try to learn at least a little bit of Korean if I had a physical dictionary or two.
On the other hand, I'm also aware I should be focusing on Japanese, which I've been neglecting more and more, and it's a fact that I could probably literally never learn all the crazy allophonic rules of Korean, or the grammar, or to read hangul, or anything else about it...
Why can't I just focus on learning Japanese or something?
EDIT: ...aaaaaaaaaaannnd I ordered the two Korean dictionaries, which probably makes me an idiot but ehhh, I assume they contain somewhat different vocabulary selection* so I'm hoping that makes me less of an idiot.
*Based on the fact that the two Japanese dictionaries I have do. I used to have four Japanese dictionaries, all with fairly different word selection (but of course a lot of the same words too, sometimes with different (and at least a few incorrect) definitions), but two vanished. I won't accuse the social services' affiliated cleaners of stealing them even though they vanished during the cleaning... it could just be that they stashed them somewhere that neither me nor my mum has been able to find them, but it is a bit suspicious. I mean, it could even be like "why does this dude have FOUR Japanese dictionaries?😂😂😂" and they threw two away without even asking. They asked before throwing anything away, but I mean... I did have four different Japanese dictionaries, which is probably a bit weird.
Brzeczyszczykiewicz wrote:I can definitely relate to this! I still remember all too well when I bought my Catalan-Catalan dictionary a few years ago; sure, it was at a second-hand bookshop and with Spanish as my mother tongue and pretty solid knowledge of French by then it was perhaps not such a crazy thing to do, but then it's also true I had never, ever, learned the slightest bit or piece of Catalan, and I still went ahead and bought it. Mind you, I don't regret it even a little! On the contrary, I've had ample time to verify it's one heck of a gem, but one still has to be careful because that's not always the case.
Brzeczyszczykiewicz wrote:It's so strange that you had found no Korean dictionaries with Romanisation until now, the first time I looked for one on Amazon I found one which did include it right away! Beginner's luck, eh?
Brzeczyszczykiewicz wrote:Unlike Japanese, with its two syllabaries and bunch of Chinese characters, Korean only uses Hangul nowadays for pretty much everything and it's not a terribly complicated system to learn, I think I actually found Arabic a bit harder, even though it has fewer letters. I find Hangeul to be very straightforward and quite fascinating, to boot, aesthetically speaking!
Brzeczyszczykiewicz wrote:As for the phonetic oddities of Korean: there are a few, to be sure, but that's another thing about the language that I've found to be considerably less abstruse than some people make it to be.
Brzeczyszczykiewicz wrote:And as for the grammar, well, I believe that is the hardest thing about Korean for many folks (along with correct pronunciation of a couple of sounds), but since you've already had a go at Japanese it shouldn't be so disorienting, because both languages work essentially the same way on quite a few levels: honorifics, particles, agglutination...
Brzeczyszczykiewicz wrote:Not to mention there are more than a few cognates since both took so much from Chinese at a certain point.
Brzeczyszczykiewicz wrote:Anyway, let us know when those two dictionaries arrive!
Brzeczyszczykiewicz wrote:They each have a certain thing that makes them quite good and that's why I'm unwilling to get rid of any of them.
linguoboy wrote:I finished the Duolingo Finnish tree this morning. Overall it was fun, though odd choices abound. I feel like I was reporting way more sentences than I have before simply because the English versions were so off so much of the time.
It made me hungry to try another course so I started Scottish Gaelic. It seems to lie within the Goldilocks zone: Familiar enough that I pick things up quickly but different enough that I don't find it boring. (I tried the Catalan course just to see what it was like and it soon became tedious.) Most importantly, I don't know the language well enough to be annoyed by their decisions. There are oddities to the English equivalents (they seem to favour literal renderings that are somewhat reminiscent of Hiberno-English), but at least I know these are the consequence of deliberate choices and not mistakes made by non-native speakers.
Linguaphile wrote:They did have a native English speaker on the team that created the course. I don't know if the somewhat Finnish-influenced English wording was the best decision, but I think it was deliberate and I can see why they did it. Actually, I think if they hadn't, learners would make some incorrect assumptions from the course that would have to be un-learned later by anyone who goes on to study at a more advanced level.
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