TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby eskandar » 2017-11-06, 20:55

I try to read as widely as I can in Middle Eastern literature. I like Turkish fiction but haven't read many of the classics (though I read Kürk Mantolu Madonna in English last year and it was one of the best novels I'd read in years). I've just read a lot of Pamuk and I need to read Tanpinar's The Time Regulation Institute someday which is sitting on my shelf.
Please correct my mistakes in any language.

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-11-08, 19:45

I watched this film yesterday:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=28k6LwXGTlg

It's the same topic that has been attracting my attention for a while now -- the life of people deep in Anatolia -- so I couldn't but like it. The film's title 'Mar' is in Kurdish and means 'a snake'; otherwise the film is completely in Turkish.

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-11-20, 18:40

By now you guys know that I change my study plans every 2-3 days, right? Well it's going to happen again. :)

Johanna mentioned something about the LWT (Learning with Texts) application recently, and I thought "Hey I got it installed somewhere and using it was fun, why don't I try and use it again". Also when creating my Memrise cards I was always keen on using the L2->L1 direction, but with Arabic it is so much harder, it takes many many many tries until I can recall them correctly in L1, so I'll try using the L1->L2 direction for a while just to increase my passive vocabulary. (Thanks Karavinka for this idea, I stole it from your Turkish thread). It should be more fun.

So my next plan is applying this approach (LWT and L2->L1) to Levantine (with the texts from GLOSS) and Kurdish (with songs and other stuff).
Last edited by voron on 2017-11-20, 20:43, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-11-20, 20:41

...and I've processed two Kurdish songs in LWT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPj0PwFf2Qg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_gEaE08Y94

Apparently when I change my studying activities I get a boost of enthusiasm...

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby Saim » 2017-11-20, 21:42

voron wrote:Apparently when I change my studying activities I get a boost of enthusiasm...


I've noticed this too. :D One of my struggles in language learning has always been finding the balance between discipline and going with the flow.

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-26, 23:57

Saim wrote:
voron wrote:Apparently when I change my studying activities I get a boost of enthusiasm...


I've noticed this too. :D One of my struggles in language learning has always been finding the balance between discipline and going with the flow.

Hmm, have you ever found that there's a certain flow to disciplined language-learning?

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-11-27, 12:24

vijayjohn wrote:Hmm, have you ever found that there's a certain flow to disciplined language-learning?

Depending on what you mean by disciplined I guess?..

I guess both Saim and I by going with the flow mean that you randomly change your resource and your study activity whenever you get bored from the previous one, or whenever you find something more fun to study from. That said, it's understood that you should study regularly (ideally every day). Would you still count it as disciplined?

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby Saim » 2017-11-27, 12:55

^ This. (also in my case often switching languages :roll: )

vijayjohn wrote:Hmm, have you ever found that there's a certain flow to disciplined language-learning?


I find that it ebbs more than it flows. :P

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-11-27, 15:37

voron wrote:you get bored from the previous one

I'm honestly not sure this has ever happened to me, but maybe that's because I've personally always seen language-learning as therapeutic. For me, learning a language - any language - is a relief from almost all other things in life. It's everything else that runs the risk of being boring to me. Eating can be boring, sleeping is very boring, walking can be boring, running can be boring, school is mostly boring, (most) social events are boring as hell, masturbating can be boring, dancing is boring, therapy is largely boring, movies are often boring, reading is often boring, and if you don't get the idea by now, I can't really help you. :lol: Languages are probably the one thing in my life that I can count on not being boring. (Well, that and interacting with friends, but languages have the extra advantage of always having had a presence in my life).

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-11-28, 19:59

A small update: now that I've been using LWT (and it's going well!) I can add the statistics bit to my log.

So, for the last week the number of new words I added:
Arabic - 133
Kurdish - 128

Not bad!

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-12-04, 15:18

So, for the past year, I've been doing almost exclusively the Levantine dialect for Arabic, and now I'm noticing that I understand it spoken better than MSA (even though MSA is supposed to be spoken more slowly and distinctly as it is used in more formal situations). Well... I am not very happy that I suck at MSA, but ok, it was an expected result of my decision to concentrate on Levantine.

As for Levantine, I guess my progress is ok... I'm probably A2 passing to B1, and I can communicate with people if they are patient enough. By now I know all the grammar, so it has become a challenge of expanding my vocabulary... which is such a painfully slow process that it makes me want to :headbang: !

Advice for myself:
-Don't stick to the resource (however good the reviews are and however useful you may think it'll be for you) if you've got bored from it. Toss it away*. Find something else.
-Don't be afraid to mix dialects**. If you like a song in Egyptian, study it. They share a lot of vocabulary anyway.

*Like, right now I'm looking at this wonderful selection of GLOSS texts with audio for Levantine, and I'm thinking how useful it'll be if I study them all, but some of them are so boring... and most of them are read by the same person whose voice I don't particularly like.

**I used to have separate decks for MSA, Levantine and Egyptian in my SRS program, which I later realized to be such a bad idea. I would add a word from a Levantine song, and then when encountering the same word in Egyptian I'd go like: Hey I remember adding this word, it should be in my deck! - only realizing a few seconds later that it was for a different dialect. And I can put up with false friends by just listing multiple definitions in my cards.

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-04, 15:43

voron wrote:*Like, right now I'm looking at this wonderful selection of GLOSS texts with audio for Levantine, and I'm thinking how useful it'll be if I study them all, but some of them are so boring... and most of them are read by the same person whose voice I don't particularly like.

And they're also read su...per...slow.

SHU! KRAN! :lol:

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-12-04, 15:58

vijayjohn wrote:And they're also read su...per...slow.

SHU! KRAN! :lol:

:hmm: I don't find Levantine recordings too slow. Perhaps it's different for different languages.

(You mean this, right? https://gloss.dliflc.edu)

EDIT: Here is a direct link to one of the recordings (it's Level 1 out of 4): https://gloss.dliflc.edu/products/gloss ... source.mp3

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-04, 16:00

Yes, it's that one. Really? You don't find them way slower than the recordings for the Syrian Arabic book, for example? Maybe it's because I'm thinking of one conversation on that website in particular, the one about booking a hotel room.

EDIT: Or maybe it's their dialogues in general. Monologues are probably much more normal, like in that clip you posted.

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-12-04, 16:07

vijayjohn wrote:Or maybe it's their dialogues in general.

Yeah maybe.

The dialogues in Syrian Colloquial are great, but their disadvantage is that all together they sum up to 10 mins of audio at most. It's definitely too little to develop an ear for the language.

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-12-05, 1:50

I just found out than on January 13, 2018, there will be held an international Turkish exam with proficiency assessment according to the CEFR framework.

There is no exam center in Belarus, but since I am planning to be in Turkey on that day, I am definitely going to apply. (This will require me a trip from Istanbul to Ankara, but it`s ok, it`s double fun!)

Now the grading system is a bit odd. There are no separate exams for each level; instead, the candidate is awarded a level according to their score out of 100:
less than 55 - failed
55-70 - B2
71-88 - C1
89-100 - C2

There is a reading, writing, listening and speaking part. The exam lasts 3 hours. More info and a sample exam is here:
http://tys.yee.org.tr/

Of course I am aspiring for C2 but I will be happy if I get C1 too. I hope I`ll be able to take it and get a nice score!
Last edited by voron on 2017-12-05, 13:46, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby aaakknu » 2017-12-05, 7:34

Good luck with the exam!
Здайся на Господа у твоїх справах, і задуми твої здійсняться. (Приповідки 16, 3)
TAC 2019

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-12-05, 13:32

Irusia wrote:Good luck with the exam!

Thank you!

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-12-05, 19:24

I'm learning this Aladdin's song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M01_HB56lWY
Lyrics: http://lyricstranslate.com/en/di-dunya- ... world.html

It's in Egyptian Arabic. The MSA version also exists:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWMnrYvGaiQ

but with me being descriptivist and communication oriented and such, I like the Egyptian version much better. :)

An interesting note. For "Give (me) your hand", the prince says هاتي إيدك. Apparently this root is only used for the imperative, otherwise عطى is used (and I think I saw it used this way in MSA and Levantine too).

Another verb with a suppletive root for the imperative is إجا (to come), which in the imperative is تع.

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Re: TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2017-12-06, 15:28

Some notes on the verb forms that I keep seeing.
Causative
فَعَّلَ (doubling the second radical) - form 2
أفْعَلَ (prepending "a") - form 4

Reflexive
تَفَعَّلَ (prepending "t" and doubling) - form 5
اِفْتَعَلَ (inserting "t" and prepending "i") - form 8

So generally "t" (prepended or inserted) is an indicator of reflexivity.
Examples:
تفرّج - to watch (it's intransitive with the meaning akin to "pleasure oneself" and requires the preposition على)
تهنّى - to be/become happy
تمشّى - to walk (how come I can't find it in the dictionary?..)

اجتمع - to get together
ارتاح - to relax


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