TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

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TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2015-12-10, 9:49

Same old languages for me.

I recently found this service that lets you practise your languages via song lyrics:
http://lyricstraining.com

It is an amazing service, very enjoyable and makes you memorize song lyrics very quickly. Adding your lyrics is simple, too, and even if your lyrics don't pass the review process and get officially published on their website, you can still use them personally and share with friends.

For example this is a child song I added for Turkish for the Teachers' Day that Turkey celebrated on Nov 24. The lyrics are very simple so those of you who know basics of Turkish can try it out:
http://lyricstraining.com/play/cocuk-sa ... HbW8nMdixb

I'm going to use this service for all my languages, by practising lyrics via the website, and then putting them into my mp3 player and listening on the go. This way I'll spend less time at the computer too.

[flag=]tr[/flag] - I have a confident B2 and I think I'd easily pass a C1 test, too. There is still a lot to learn, though. I'll try to read more (novels and news) and learn from songs, too.

Some useful links for Turkish:
Etymological dictionary - http://www.etimolojiturkce.com/
Turkish-English, English-Turkish dictionary - http://tureng.com
Turkish-Russian, Russian-Turkish dictionary - http://demek.ru
Dictionaries of TDK, Turkish Language Society - http://tdk.gov.tr

[flag=]ku[/flag] (Kurmanji) - I have fallen in love with this language. If I don't learn it my life won't be complete. My current level is around A2. For practice, I'll use songs (I love nearly every Kurdish song out there), and try to talk more to my Kurdish friends. My priority is being able to converse, not so much to read and write.

Links:
Amazing Kurdish-Russian dictionary - http://www.kurdonline.ru .It's an electronic version of the dictionary of the famous Soviet-Kurdish Kurdologist Kanat Kurdoyev (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanate_Kurdo)

Lyrics of Kurdish songs with Turkish translations:
http://kurtcesarkisozu.com
http://sarkisozleri.kurtcebilgi.com
http://www.kurdeo.net

It's great that I can find lyrics for almost every Kurdish song that I like.
An example of a song I can't find the lyrics for: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDdrtUt9cq4

Maybe someone can use their searching capabilities to help me out with this song.

[flag=]ar[/flag] (Standard Arabic) - My priority is to be able to read the Qur'an and other religious texts.

Links:
http://corpus.quran.com/

I was surprised I couldn't find glossed translation of the Qur'an into Russian. I encountered articles though saying that word for word translation is prohibited because it can distort the original meaning.

I also thought of playing with Syrian Arabic (it could be fun given that I have some Syrian friends), not sure I'll have enough time and motivation.
Last edited by voron on 2017-01-06, 13:29, edited 3 times in total.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby Trapy » 2015-12-13, 1:47

voron wrote:Same old languages for me.


Half of us are jealous that you can be dedicated so strongly to continue to improve, rather than go "easy " mode and learn new ones :)

I'll have to check out the lyrics site, especially since I think some of my languages next year will be harder than normal to find.
"and now every toilet will burn to ashes!""

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2015-12-13, 17:28

Trapy wrote:Half of us are jealous that you can be dedicated so strongly to continue to improve, rather than go "easy " mode and learn new ones

I now live in a city where my languages are the 3 most spoken ones, so it's relatively easy to stay motivated. ;)

[flag=]ku[/flag]
I added 3 songs to the lyricstraining website, and practised them a bit.
Şahe Bedo -- Diyarbekir Mala Min
http://lyricstraining.com/play/sahe-bed ... HkEvrcQiwk

Şahe Bedo -- Çavreşa Min
http://lyricstraining.com/play/sahe-bed ... H0ZDLkEiw0

Ibrahim Rojhilat -- Ji Bira Min Naçi
http://lyricstraining.com/play/ibrahim- ... HZDLkEviwZ

There was a little dillema I had to solve before adding the songs. The Kurdish alphabet has 3 special letters which are not found in the Turkish keyboard layout, namely: î, û, ê. More precisely, you can enter these letters, but only by using key combinations. For example, for entering î in the Turkish layout, you would press Shift+3, and then type normal i. So I thought about creating my own custom layout for the Kurdish alphabet, since Windows doesn't come with one by default. But I kept procrastinating for 2 weeks... So I finally gave up. When I have to type these letters on the lyricstraining website, I just type normal i,u,e, and the system accepts them as correct.

This can make me memorize wrong spelling of the words containing these letters, but I decided not to care. After all, Kurdish is not used much in its written form, and even most native speakers cannot write it properly (in fact most of them cannot write it at all), so why would I care.

In fact this is a general approach to the language learning that I worked out over time. If an exercise seems boring or hard to do (and causes you to procrastinate), no matter how useful it seems to be, just drop it and start a different one that you like. Doing something fun and little but regularly is in the long run more effective than pushing yourself into hard drills that you keep procrastinating.
Last edited by voron on 2016-10-31, 23:34, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby OldBoring » 2015-12-14, 11:58

I live in a city where the three most spoken languages are North-Eastern Mandarin, Beijing Mandarin and broken Mandarin.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby vijayjohn » 2015-12-14, 18:10

Well, I must be fluent in the last one! :lol:

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby OldBoring » 2015-12-16, 4:36

Me too! :shock:

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2015-12-18, 23:54

[flag=]ku[/flag] Watched lessons 23, 24, 25 of Dersa Kurdî on youtube.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-01-02, 23:22

OldBoring wrote:Me too! :shock:

We must speak widely differing varieties of bad Mandarin, then. :lol:

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2016-04-10, 7:15

empty
Last edited by voron on 2016-04-14, 8:11, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2016-04-10, 12:04

A note on my progress with
[flag=]ku[/flag] Kurdish

I am dissappointed with the fact that I can't talk to people using Standard Kurmanji. They understand me more or less alright, but I can't understand their replies because even the basic vocabulary can be different (words like to speak, to look, to watch, to put). The ban on the Kurdish language was lifted recently, and the standard didn't have a chance yet to spread among people.

To overcome this difficulty I need to work on dialects alongside the standard. I want to start with telling stories in Standard Kurmanji to my Kurdish friend, and ask him how he'd say this or that in his dialect.

I'll start with Little Red Riding Hood :) (Keça Kumsor in Kurdish).

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2016-04-12, 21:45

Progress:
[flag=]ku[/flag]
Finished chapter 4/8 of the book Hînker 2. Also, reviewed Memrise cards for this book.

Goals for tomorrow:
1) Install LWT
2) Import a small story into LWT (there are a few fairy tales on youtube, I'll use those)
3) Tell it to my friend

Sadly I'll have to leave Turkey in about 3 months. I'm nervously trying to improve my Turkish in the remaining time by trying to force myself to read. I should stop it and relax. I'll just concenrate on Kurdish until my leave, and drop everything else including Bulgarian.

Goals until my leave:

[flag=]ku[/flag]
Finish Hînker 2
Tell 1-2 stories per week to my friend and try to actually talk to him in Kurdish

That's it. No pressure.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Kurdish)

Postby voron » 2016-04-12, 21:48

Wtf I already speak Turkish good enough and I have a lifetime to improve it.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Kurdish)

Postby Michael » 2016-04-13, 3:43

Eğer sana sorduğum zahmet olmasa, ne için Bulgaristan'a taşınacaksın? Türkiye'ye geri dönecek mi sin?
American English (en-us) Neapolitan from Molise (nap) N Italian (it) B2 Spanish (es) Portuguese (pt) French (fr) Greek (el) Albanian (sq) B1 Polish (pl) Romanian (ro) A2 Azerbaijani (az) Turkish (tr) Old English (en_old) A1
„Çdo njeri është peng i veprave të veta.‟
Every human being is hostage to their own deeds.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Kurdish)

Postby voron » 2016-04-13, 9:04

Michael, mevzu biraz hassas olduğu için sana PM üzerinden mesaj attım.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Kurdish)

Postby voron » 2016-04-13, 13:32

1) I've set up LWT on a virtual server so I can now access it from everywhere, including my mobile.

2) And I've imported a story into it, and added translations for new words. This is the story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBie6gEsLn0

Exporting a list of new words is easy. Here it is:

Code: Select all

mange   inek
dinepixîne   şişiriyor
hîna   henüz
beq   kurbağa
diqehere   kızıyor
biteqî   patlayacaksın
li nav mêrgekê   çayırda
terîya   kuyruk

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Kurdish)

Postby voron » 2016-04-17, 19:11

[flag=]ku[/flag]

Finished chapter 5/8 of Hînker 2

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Kurdish)

Postby voron » 2016-04-23, 12:13

[flag=]ku[/flag]
There is this Kurdish rapper Rezan whose songs I like a lot. I found lyrics for several of his songs and loaded them into LWT.

One of his songs is called "Bajarê min" (My city). I love the video. It was shot in several cities of Kurdistan. The Diyarbakir (Amed in Kurdish) part of the video was shot on one of the towers of the famous Diyarbakir city walls. From this tower one can enjoy a magnificent view on the Tigris river (Dîcle in Kurdish), and fertile Mesopotamian fields and pastures.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OFtYFc8Ft4

And.. the weather has finally become hot in Istanbul. :partyhat: So we can say that summer has come, or in Kurdish
Havin hat!

havin - summer
hat - came

Rezan has a song with this name:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-uUh64X0zo

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2016-07-07, 10:23

Time for an update.

[flag=]tr[/flag]
I am finally starting to feel contented with my level in Turkish.

We are currently on long Eid al-Fitr (or Ramazan) vacations, and it's time for visiting friends and relatives (or in my case only friends). I do a lot of visits, and wherever I go I can easily become a center of everyone's attention, because everyone likes to listen to foreigner's stories about his country, and his perspectives about the differences with Turkey. I've become totally comfortable with engaging in this kind of conversations. I have a few funny stories up my sleeve which I start with. For example the story that all the barber's shops have transparent windows here, which is unheard of in my country, and how it makes me uncomfortable to get a shave while everyone outside stares. Then the conversation goes in all kinds of different directions: religion, politics, economics, Erdoğan, refugees, terrorists, education, food, etc etc. There may be words I don't know but I can easily guess them from the context. Also I've learnt to understand a variety of different accents, the ones I'm most comfortable with are the Eastern Turkish accents (given that a half of my friends are Kurdish and they speak with this kind of accents). All in all, I'm pretty happy with my level.

[flag=]ku[/flag]
I finished my Kurdish course with 97/100 for the final exam, and now I'm a certified B1 Kurdish speaker.

What does it mean in practice? There were a few times when I had long-ish (15-20 minutes) conversations completely in Kurdish. One of them was especially rewarding since it was with a Syrian Kurd, who cannot speak Turkish very well. I can get the gist of conversations when I eavesdrop to people's talking around me (and I get to hear Kurdish a lot, it's everywhere I go in Istanbul). Getting used to idiosyncracies of a specific person matters a lot. For example, I understand nearly everything what my flatmate says when he speaks to his relatives, as I get to listen to him and have smalltalks in Kurdish with him everyday.

There are a few things that don't let me progress as fast as I'd like to:
1) Dialect variations. The Kurdish I learnt at the course is quite different from the Kurdish(es) people really speak. My flatmate and his family use different words for "to speak", "to take", "to close", "to put" than the standard. (Honestly I have never yet heard anyone using the "standard" words appart from the academia). These differences cannot be found in books and can be learnt only from talking to people.

2) Every Kurmanji Kurdish speaker also knows Turkish. Many older people (in their 60-70) can only speak to some extent and they struggle looking for words when they try to express themselves in Turkish, but they still understand fine. Younger people obviously speak Turkish as their native language.

[flag=]ar[/flag]
My MSA develops very slowly and in a purely read-only mode. Once in a while I read small texts in Arabic, news and the Quran. I have to use the dictionary extensively but as for the grammar I usually understand all the morphology and syntax in a sentence. I defninitely need to give my studies a boost if I want to get anywhere further with MSA.

A few times I had conversations in MSA with Syrians, and one time with a guy from Iraq. They were basic smalltalks (where are you from, what's your job etc), and as soon as we deviated from the beginners topics, it started being more of a gesture and language body talk. Still, these were nice and rewarding experiences, and they make me want improve my conversational abilities in MSA.

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby vijayjohn » 2016-07-07, 15:03

I've been learning some quatrains from an epic poem in what's basically Malayalam with lots and lots of Sanskrit (much more than Malayalam normally has), and while I was reading your TAC, I kind of sung (in my head) random parts of it that were jumbled together but in tune. :lol: (Poems in Malayalam are always supposed to be sung).

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Re: TAC 2016 - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

Postby voron » 2016-07-07, 22:57

And just before reading your post I read a post about Sanskrit. It is a linguistic problem for Russian speaking students, which gives a text in Sanskrit and asks to translate it to Russian without assuming any knoweldge of Sanskrit, just by using the cognates between Sanskrit and Russian:
http://erudit-ru.livejournal.com/468.html


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