TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-10, 10:34

I read story 8, الاشارة الحمراء.

It had two synonyms for "to prepare" (transitive):
ّأعد
جهّز


And also, two synonyms for "to fall":
سقط
وقع

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

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-07-11, 4:14

Saim wrote:Also I'm talking about r/languagelearning, not random parts of Reddit.

But to what extent are people on r/languagelearning serious language learners anyway?

I haven't been on Reddit in a long time, but I remember I subscribed to that sub and then decided, almost certainly within a few months, to unsubscribe. Apart from you and a few other people, I just couldn't find anyone else saying anything particularly insightful or even helpful, really. IIRC I wrote a post about Dinka and no one even responded. I wrote another about Krio, and (also IIRC) only four people did respond, one of whom spoke it (non-natively) and the other three of whom were like "what's Krio?". (And I have to say, in general, it's astonishing to me how little interest there is in African languages on Reddit. Even the Swahili subreddit is practically dead. Even Papuan languages get more meaningful attention than Swahili does; the only African language I know of that gets even a little bit of meaningful attention there is Amharic, and mostly from people learning it). So I don't find it terribly surprising that some of them would be the kind of people who don't do anything beyond just Duolingo.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-11, 19:46

I read stories 9 and 10 of level 3, thus finishing the level. Moving on to level 4!

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

Postby Yasna » 2019-07-12, 1:19

vijayjohn wrote:(And I have to say, in general, it's astonishing to me how little interest there is in African languages on Reddit. Even the Swahili subreddit is practically dead. Even Papuan languages get more meaningful attention than Swahili does; the only African language I know of that gets even a little bit of meaningful attention there is Amharic, and mostly from people learning it)

Isn't that par for the course? I can count on one hand the number of serious learners of African languages I have come across on the Internet in my entire life.
Ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns. - Kafka

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-12, 9:51

vijayjohn wrote:But to what extent are people on r/languagelearning serious language learners anyway?

Damn you guys, I just installed the app and registered there, and killed two hours reading and posting stuff. :evil:

Not on r/languagelearning though, mostly Turkey and MENA related groups. R/languagelearning is indeed boring. (I did find one potentially useful post there though about how to download subtitles from Netflix.)

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

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-07-12, 22:42

Sorry voron! :blush:
Yasna wrote:Isn't that par for the course? I can count on one hand the number of serious learners of African languages I have come across on the Internet in my entire life.

Yeah, but:
vijayjohn wrote:Even Papuan languages get more meaningful attention than Swahili does

I know the most widely spoken languages in Africa don't get much attention, but what I'm saying is they get less attention than languages that are far more obscure. Let me flesh out the Papuan vs. Swahili example to illustrate this:

R/papuan is, understandably, pretty dead. I posted something there about the Papuan languages I picked to focus on. They are endangered languages spoken on random Indonesian islands that are so tiny that I seriously suspect they're not even included on some world maps. Who is going to care about languages that are that obscure? And yet I still managed to have a short discussion with someone about these languages, and this person actually knew a thing or two about Papuan languages!

By contrast, while r/swahili technically has more posts than r/papuan, there is just no participation. From what I recall, the situation there is as follows: No one posts anything in three months at a time, not even a comment. I write a post in Swahili going "hey, let's talk in Swahili!" (which works for all kinds of other languages, again including much more obscure ones). No response. I post a link to a useful resource for learning Swahili. Still no response. The other posts either require zero knowledge of Swahili or are short posts or links to news articles in Swahili, and there are usually no comments at all to those, either. Occasionally, there is one comment; rarely, there are up to three. All the comments are very short. No one seems to use Swahili on other subreddits, either, just English.

So it's pretty weird to me that you can find interest for the most obscure Papuan languages but not for what people all over East Africa speak. :hmm: And not for lack of fluent speakers on Reddit, either.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-14, 13:26

I read stories 1 and 2 from level 4 of my reader.
Story 1, دمنة و شتربة, was a story from "Kalila wa Dimna".

Here is a pic from story 2. As you can see it has more Arabic on the page compared to the previous levels.

Image

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-15, 15:43

I read story 3, عفاريت اللصوص, whose plot repeats Grimm's Town Musicians of Bremen.

Also, I ordered another bunch of Arabic readers. :) Expecting them to arrive this week.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-16, 12:31

My Turkish landlord was born in Germany and speaks German natively. :shock:

Makes me wanderlust for German like crazy. But I know I won't have time for it!

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-16, 19:38

I read story 4 but I think I want to re-read it again tomorrow because it had tons of new words in it.

EDIT: Actually no, re-reading is boring. If a word is useful enough to be learnt, I'll see it in other stories.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-17, 9:48

I read story 5 سفروت الحطاب, Safrut the Woodcutter.

Learnt the word ماس /ma:s/ diamond from it, and suddenly realized that in Turkish elmas and Russian алмаз /al'mas/, the initial el/al is the definite article. (There is a number of this kind of borrowings in Turkish, Russian and English, like algorithm, alcohol, I just never realized it about elmas before).

Also, it means that the final з in Russian алмаз is a hypercorrection.

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

Postby eskandar » 2019-07-18, 10:21

voron wrote:Learnt the word ماس /ma:s/ diamond from it, and suddenly realized that in Turkish elmas and Russian алмаз /al'mas/, the initial el/al is the definite article. (There is a number of this kind of borrowings in Turkish, Russian and English, like algorithm, alcohol, I just never realized it about elmas before).

It could be. But الألماس (where أل is the first part of the word, not the definite article) is more common in Arabic. The word entered Arabic from Middle Persian, where the initial al was part of the word. Most likely the word ماس is a backformation from ألماس, that is, at some point Arabs reanalyzed the word almaas as *al-maas.
Please correct my mistakes in any language.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-18, 16:53

eskandar wrote:It could be. But الألماس (where أل is the first part of the word, not the definite article) is more common in Arabic. The word entered Arabic from Middle Persian, where the initial al was part of the word. Most likely the word ماس is a backformation from ألماس, that is, at some point Arabs reanalyzed the word almaas as *al-maas.

Interesting, thanks! Then it's likely that Turkish borrowed it directly from Persian.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-18, 21:21

I read stories 6 and 7 of level 4.

Image

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

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-07-22, 8:26

It was kind of funny for me that y'all were talking about ألماس because I was recently wondering what languages have that word (besides Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Russian, and languages that I guess got it from Russian). :D

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-22, 22:50

I was recently thinking about how effective reading is compared to Anki.

Suppose I want to learn 2000 words, which is B1 in CEFR. How many pages do I need to read daily to memorize them effectively?

According to Zipf's Law, the least frequent of those words will appear with the probability P/2000, and for English P=7% (and it is similar for other languages).

If a text has W words, then the probability of the least frequent word to appear in the text is approximately W*7/2000, or, in pages, 500*N*7/2000 = N*7/4, if I assume that an average page has 500 words.

How many pages do I need to read for all 2000 most frequent words to appear almost certainly? It's
N*7/4 = 100,
N≈60 pages

Let's assume that I need to see a word every day in order to memorize it. It gives me 60 pages/day for B1.

The number changes proportionally to the CEFR level (
https://universeofmemory.com/how-many-w ... ould-know/):
A2 - 30 pages/day
B1 - 60 pages/day
B2 - 120 pages/day
C1 - 240 pages/day
C2 - 480 pages/day.

While it looks doable for lower levels, consuming nearly 500 pages/day (or an equivalent amount of other input) is nearly impossible: it's several hours of reading! It seems to imply that in order to improve to C1-C2, you should either do a full-day immersion, or use Anki. :doggy:

(There is an open question though how effective Anki is when you learn a word in a single context, or even if you use several contexts that you found by sentence mining, compared to encountering the word naturally in a book).

EDIT: Perhaps I should divide the number of pages by 2 or even by 3, because seeing a word not every day but once per two or three days should be enough. Also, if I want to learn words on a specific topic, choosing a book on this topic increases the frequency of the appearance of the words. Perhaps the numbers won't be so high after all. If I divide my initial estimates by 4, I get:
A2 - 7 pages/day
B1 - 15 pages/day
B2 - 30 pages/day
C1 - 60 pages/day
C2 - 120 pages/day

which is hard for C2, given that reading should be regular, but is pretty doable for C1.

I think more research can be done on this topic, with statistical tests applied to a text corpus. I want to prove the point that the effect of using Anki is comparable to having a sufficient amount of regular active input in L2, and the usefulness of Anki is exaggerated.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-23, 8:22

I read story 8 الحمار القارئ.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-24, 11:48

(ar)
I watched a couple of videos from this youtube channel, تركيا للعراقيين- Turkey for Iraqis:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEL_bF ... 9UpKZu-vEg

The host explains things like obtaining the residence permit in Turkey, which I had to deal a lot with as well, so it helps me understand the videos.

(de)
Watched this comedian:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwfhfvwz-qU

To my content, with the help of the auto-generated subtitles I could understand a good part of what he said.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-25, 14:03

I thought I could try and pass the entrance exam to the Mediterranean University in Antalya. Their gorgeous campus is located in just 30 min walk distance from my house.

The exam for foreigners consists of 2 tests: Maths and General Ability. Both of them look very easy (to me as a maths graduate). Here are sample questions (in Turkish and English):
https://yos.akdeniz.edu.tr/resources/yo ... orular.pdf

I already missed this year's application deadline and exam, so I will do it next year. I'm pretty sure I'll pass, and I already passed the other requirement -- the Turkish language proficiency test -- last year at level C1 (Turkish universities require at least B2).

It would be fun to study at a Turkish uni. My decision will depend on the amount of my free time and the tuition fee though.

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

Postby voron » 2019-07-25, 18:22

I read story 9 نعمان. Just one story left until I finish level 4.


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