TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

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TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby IchBinEinPolyglotter » 2014-12-09, 1:29

New to this forum! As my first post, I'm announcing my Total Annihilation Challenge plans for 2015.

[flag=]fr[/flag] So I had dabbled in the language on and off in late 2013/ early 2014 but probably never spent more than ~30 hours or so with the language. In the past few weeks, I have really buckled down AJATT-style. I've been exposing myself to the language as much as possible every day, via audiobooks (Le Hobbit, Jules Verne, Harry Potter), music, radio, movies (dubs of American movies mostly), comics (Tintin and Astérix Le Gaulois), etc. Aside from this, I've also been using the following materials for just old-fashioned "studying":

Pimsleur (Lesson 21)
FSI French Phonology (Lesson 10)

And as soon as I finish FSI French Phonology (tomorrow), I'm gonna start on Assimil French With Ease (the 1998 edition; I've heard it's better than more recent versions). At some point, I'll throw in FSI French Basic as well.

Knowing Spanish to a high level (~C1) has helped tremendously, of course. It makes reading possible even from day one, at least of comics (the pictures aid with the learning of new words). Listening is a different animal altogether, but I'm starting to pick up not just isolated words but sometimes entire sentences and even paragraphs/conversations.

The most exciting part of learning French will be that this is the first non-native language that will be almost entirely or entirely self-taught. I started learning Spanish in school, although I supplemented the poor quality instruction with lots of native media and Anki when I realized just how slow classroom learning was. I started learning Chinese by myself but then took classes on it in high school and college as well (before I realized I don't learn well that way). On the other hand, I never have and never plan on taking a French class.

My goals are to reach at least B2, aka basic fluency, by July or August. Rather ambitious, but I think it's doable.

[flag=]zh[/flag] I've been working with Mandarin on and off for some time, but life got in the way and I put it to the side. I still occasionally skim Chinese texts, listen to Chinese music, etc., so my skills have not completely eroded away. Anyways, I'm gonna get back to it sometime in late winter/ early spring, once my French is decently established.

I'd rate my current abilities at around an A2. I'd like to bring that to at least a B1 by the end of the year.

And on the back burner (languages that I have a solid command of, but that I will still be in contact with, just not as extensively as my main languages):

[flag=]es[/flag] I would rate myself around a C1, maybe even a C2 for listening and reading comprehension. At this point, being with Spanish never seems like work. It doesn't feel any different from just enjoying something in my native English. I have a couple of TV shows I really like that I watch on a regular basis, I like to keep up with Spanish and Latin American cinema, and I have a fairly large collection of Spanish music collected over the years. I'm also a huge fan of Jose Luis Borges, so I've been reading through some of his poetry and prose. I also anki new words I find, usually literary terms or occasionally slang.

[flag=]kn[/flag] I'm a native speaker of Kannada, since I speak it with my parents, but I'm also illiterate :cry: , like heritage speakers often are. This also means I suffer from many problems associated with illiteracy: a scant vocabulary and an inability to understand the higher registers of the language (which are often heavily Sanskritized). Fortunately, Kannada has a fairly intuitive abugida writing system, so one of these days, I plan on learning it, and hopefully I can work through a couple of books by year's end.

So... there! Let's see how I do.

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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-09, 2:28

Hi, IchBinEinPolyglotter! Welcome to UniLang, and good luck with your TAC! :D

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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby dEhiN » 2014-12-10, 8:17

IchBinEinPolyglotter wrote:New to this forum!

Hi and welcome to UniLang!

[flag=]kn[/flag] I'm a native speaker of Kannada, since I speak it with my parents, but I'm also illiterate :cry: , like heritage speakers often are. This also means I suffer from many problems associated with illiteracy: a scant vocabulary and an inability to understand the higher registers of the language (which are often heavily Sanskritized). Fortunately, Kannada has a fairly intuitive abugida writing system, so one of these days, I plan on learning it, and hopefully I can work through a couple of books by year's end.

Yes we now have one more Dravidian language speaker! Slowly, yet surely we're going to take over the South Asian Languages forum, so watch out all you Indo-Aryan speakers, here we come! :twisted:

So... there! Let's see how I do.

Good luck.
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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-10, 18:25

Also, IchBinEinPolyglotter, even if you can't read Kannada yet, I think it's great that you talk to your parents in it! Most of us don't talk to our parents in our heritage language. AFAIK, dEhiN doesn't, and I only talk to my parents in Malayalam sometimes (and they only talk to me in it sometimes, too).
dEhiN wrote:Yes we now have one more Dravidian language speaker! Slowly, yet surely we're going to take over the South Asian Languages forum, so watch out all you Indo-Aryan speakers, here we come! :twisted:

It's not like there are all that many speakers of Indo-Aryan languages on this forum right now anyway. And a lot of them are also at least interested in learning Dravidian languages. :lol:

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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby dEhiN » 2014-12-10, 19:00

vijayjohn wrote:Also, IchBinEinPolyglotter, even if you can't read Kannada yet, I think it's great that you talk to your parents in it! Most of us don't talk to our parents in our heritage language. AFAIK, dEhiN doesn't, and I only talk to my parents in Malayalam sometimes (and they only talk to me in it sometimes, too).

This is true; I say the occasional word or small phrase here and there. This is mostly due to growing up speaking to my parents in English, and even though I started learning Tamil almost 15 years ago, doing it so infrequently that I never progressed past the basics.

And yes, IchBinEinPolyglotter, I think it's great that you talk to your parents in it. I'm not sure if Kannada has a fairly big divide between the written and spoken forms - like centhamizh and kodunthamizh - but if so, you might run into the same problems I've had, at least initially. For me, the few words and phrases I know, I learned how to say them first. So usually when I have to write them down - even though I know how to read and write Tamil - I'm always guessing. But now I'm finding that as I start learning the pronunciation 'rules' of a particular dialect, like Sri Lankan Colombo Tamil, I can then determine how to write based on the spoken form. Though I still find that there are 2 or 3 vowels that when in the middle or at the end of a word are pronounced like what sounds like a schwa to me. So that sound and guessing which vowel is used is difficult.

I haven't looked into Kannada's writing at all, but do most lessons teach the abugida like a giant grid? That's almost the only way I've seen it taught in Tamil. The first row has the vowels, the first column the consonants, and each "inner" square a vowel-consonant combo.
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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-10, 19:30

I'm honestly not sure that any other Dravidian language has the kind of diglossia that you see in Tamil. I've never seen any evidence that they do. I've never seen anything like that in Malayalam, that's for sure.
dEhiN wrote:I haven't looked into Kannada's writing at all, but do most lessons teach the abugida like a giant grid? That's almost the only way I've seen it taught in Tamil. The first row has the vowels, the first column the consonants, and each "inner" square a vowel-consonant combo.

I do know the writing system, and I don't think so. I've seen that before for Kannada, but I think I've also seen approaches that just list out the symbols used for combining vowels with consonants. Also, IIRC, I found that learning how to write CV sequences in Tamil script (particularly consonant + u) is harder than in any other Indian script I know of. It actually made me take a really long time to learn that script.

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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby dEhiN » 2014-12-10, 21:59

vijayjohn wrote:Also, IIRC, I found that learning how to write CV sequences in Tamil script (particularly consonant + u) is harder than in any other Indian script I know of. It actually made me take a really long time to learn that script.

Yeah consonant + u is difficult since each one is different. Although you could group them into categories based on the general type of flourish added on. I didn't find the rest of the CV sequences hard. It took me long to learn the order of the consonants, and even now I'm still not sure of the Grantha letters order. What about in Malayalam or Kannada - how many consonants and vowels apiece do they each have?
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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby Meera » 2014-12-10, 22:18

vijayjohn wrote:I'm honestly not sure that any other Dravidian language has the kind of diglossia that you see in Tamil. I've never seen any evidence that they do. I've never seen anything like that in Malayalam, that's for sure.


I'm not sure about Kannada or Malayalam, but Telugu definitely does. All the Telugu speakers I know complain about it constantly. There's a Telugu speaker on another form I know who was born here and her parents taught her to read it but when she can't understand half of what they say in Telugu movies and she told me what you read is like a 100 times different than what you speak. I've seen a lot of Telugu speakers complain about it on youtube too under movies and songs. I'm sure it isn't as intense as Tamil, but there must be some diglossia there.
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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-11, 3:31

dEhiN wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Also, IIRC, I found that learning how to write CV sequences in Tamil script (particularly consonant + u) is harder than in any other Indian script I know of. It actually made me take a really long time to learn that script.

Yeah consonant + u is difficult since each one is different. Although you could group them into categories based on the general type of flourish added on. I didn't find the rest of the CV sequences hard. It took me long to learn the order of the consonants, and even now I'm still not sure of the Grantha letters order. What about in Malayalam or Kannada - how many consonants and vowels apiece do they each have?

A lot. :lol: Malayalam and Kannada both have 15 "vowels" (although it's really just 5 short vowels, their long equivalents, 2 diphthongs, "ru," "am," and "ah" (yes, all of those are treated as "vowels" in the writing systems :lol:)). I believe Kannada is supposed to have 34 consonants, and Malayalam has 36 (plus 5 "silent letters," i.e. special characters for syllable-final [ɳ], [n], [r], [l], and [ɭ] in that order).

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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby dEhiN » 2014-12-11, 6:45

vijayjohn wrote:A lot. :lol: Malayalam and Kannada both have 15 "vowels" (although it's really just 5 short vowels, their long equivalents, 2 diphthongs, "ru," "am," and "ah" (yes, all of those are treated as "vowels" in the writing systems :lol:)). I believe Kannada is supposed to have 34 consonants, and Malayalam has 36 (plus 5 "silent letters," i.e. special characters for syllable-final [ɳ], [n], [r], [l], and [ɭ] in that order).

Wow! That's a lot. I guess Tamil has 5 short vowels, their long equivalents, and 2 diphthongs making 12 vowels. And then if you count the Grantha letters, there are 23 consonants (18 without the Grantha letters). But then one letter - shri - is only that, so it's standalone. So that's really 22 consonants. And if we start considering the CV letters, technically you could get all combinations of 22x12, but in actually you get less than that. Oh and Tamil has the aytam letter 'ஃ'. So I think technically there are 313 or 317 "letters" that are possible in Tamil, but in actual usage there's more like 247 or something along those lines.
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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby IchBinEinPolyglotter » 2014-12-12, 21:50

Update for the past few days...

[flag=]fr[/flag] Finished up FSI French Phonology and started on Assimil. I'm on lesson 3 of Assimil and 25 of Pimsleur (as in I've finished up to and including those lessons). I've been watching a lot of French movies, TV shows, etc. as well as listening to the radio, music, Le Hobbit and other audio books, etc. I pretty much have something in French playing in the background most of the day.

As for the other languages, nothing special. A little Chinese conversation, a new Spanish pen pal, and of course Kannada with my parents.

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Re: TAC 2015- Français, 中文- IchBinEinPolyglotter

Postby vijayjohn » 2014-12-12, 23:46

Welcome back! Thanks for coming back, and sorry for hijacking your thread! :lol:


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