Saim's log 2017-2019

[vijayjohn]

Nice thanks.

You're welcome!

Yesterday I overheard the Romanians speaking on the phone. The older one said something like magazin (shop from Russian)

Yeah, it's magazin, but it's from French, not Russian.

and the young guy was talking to a friend (I guess) and asked him "Ai futu-o?" which is the only thing I understood. lol

I didn't know the word futu, and it turned out to mean exactly what I was hoping it didn't.

[eskandar]

Really? Hmm I am trying to imagine what I say in Russian when I am ordering food at a cafe, and it's usually something very simple: Hello, please bring the menu, I would like this and this, do you have a salad, etc.

In Mexican Spanish, the usual way to order is to say me da (lit. "you give me/you are giving me X") which no one would guess. In Arabic you can say اعطيني ... which is easy enough but ممكن ... ("is an X possible?") is also super common. In French you can say je voudrais ("I would like") but I think it's more common to say je prends ("I'll take"). All of these are pretty idiomatic. I'm not sure if Persian and English are more flexible. There are tons of different ways to order, many of them are fairly transparent rather than idiomatic though there are also idioms that could be unpredictable for a learner ("I'll have", or "lemme get", for example, probably aren't confusing but I doubt a non-native speaker would spontaneously produce them if they hadn't heard them used before; in Persian لطف میکنین "you do me the favor of" is pretty idiomatic, but there are plenty of more transparent ways to order food). Then again, maybe it's just that Persian and English are the languages I know best, so I can see that flexibility, whereas in other languages I would doubt whether certain things are natural to say or if I'm translating too literally from English, so I stick to the idioms I know.

[Bubulus]

In El Salvador, if it's a mom and pop tiny corner store, you can say me regala X ("do you give me X as a gift?"), even though you're of course supposed to pay.

In restaurants me da X is used, but quisiera X por favor (which, like French je voudrais X, is "I would want X (please)") is more common...

[Saim]

Yeah in Spain you can say "me pones un/una...?" (you place me; Cat. "em poses un/una") in bars and stuff.

[eskandar]

Never heard me regala though Googling shows it's used in Colombia and, I imagine, elsewhere.

Now that I think of it, quisiera can be used in Mexican Spanish too, though I think it's more polite, something you might say in a nice restaurant. Alongside me da you can also say me trae ("you bring me").

[vijayjohn]

Now that I think of it, quisiera can be used in Mexican Spanish too, though I think it's more polite, something you might say in a nice restaurant.

That's pretty much how I always understood je voudrais as well.

[voron]

In Arabic you can say اعطيني ... which is easy enough but ممكن ... ("is an X possible?") is also super common.

Yeah now that I think of it, in Russian and Arabic you would just use the imperative mood of "to give", and even without adding "please" it sounds neutral, while in some other languages it would sound plain rude (including, for example, Turkish). It's interesting that just like in Arabic we can also say ممكن in Russian to order food: можно, and the thing that you want in the accusative.

In Italy I heard both "volevo" (I would like) and "prendo" (I am taking).

[הענט]

Nice thanks.

You're welcome!

Yesterday I overheard the Romanians speaking on the phone. The older one said something like magazin (shop from Russian)

Yeah, it's magazin, but it's from French, not Russian.

and the young guy was talking to a friend (I guess) and asked him "Ai futu-o?" which is the only thing I understood. lol

I didn't know the word futu, and it turned out to mean exactly what I was hoping it didn't.

WellI know this word from my favorite movie Pulp Fiction. When I'm bored I mess around with the subs settings.

Anyway the word is quite similar to foder and other Romance varieties of this word.

About magazin coming from magasin. I realize there are quite many French loans in Russian, but it's a false friend to our Czech magazín which means the same thing as the English magazine (the one you read , not the ammo)

[Saim]

EDIT: I just realized I updated my TAC at Saim's place. Sorry .

You're right.

Hungarian:
Itt fogyasztod vagy elviszed?
Lit: Here consume-[you/it] or away-take-[you/it]

It can also be "Itt fogyasztod vagy elvitelre (implied: kéred)?" --- [...] or for the take-away? This is fairly common even though the two parts of the sentence don't really fit together from a strict grammatical point of view (with the omission of kéred).

(For those of you who don't speak Hungarian "elvitelre kéred" could be parsed as something like: you "ask for it for take-away" / Do you want to eat it here or do you want it for take-away.)

visz - he/she/it carries
elvisz - he/she/it carries/takes away
elvitel - the act of taking/carrying away, ie. "take-away"
elvitelre - (the literal meaning of "-re" is usually onto, but it can also refer to the purpose of something, e.g. "Mire kell ez?" - "What do you need this for?") for (the purpose of) taking away

kér - he/she/it asks, requests

Kösz!

[dEhiN]

Now that I think of it, quisiera can be used in Mexican Spanish too, though I think it's more polite, something you might say in a nice restaurant.

That's pretty much how I always understood je voudrais as well.

Yeah the use of the conditional makes it polite like in English. I think for casual use you could say je prends as previously stated or also je veux.

[Saim]

pl. Nie znam się na + LOCATIVE
sr. Ne razumem se u + ACCUSATIVE

"I'm not good at, I don't know much about..."

[voron]

pl. Nie znam się na + LOCATIVE
sr. Ne razumem se u + ACCUSATIVE

"I'm not good at, I don't know much about..."

Russian: я не разбираюсь в + LOCATIVE
Turkish: -dan anlamıyorum (ABLATIVE)

[Saim]

Спасибо/teşekkürler!

It's interesting this phrase has a direct equivalent even in Turkish, I assumed it was a Slavic thing since I can't think of an equivalent in English, Urdu or any Romance language (may be wrong though).

[הענט]

Ich kenne mich nicht mit Pilzen aus.

Pilzen - mushrooms

[voron]

Ich kenne mich nicht mit Pilzen aus.

And in Czech?

[הענט]

Ich kenne mich nicht mit Pilzen aus.

And in Czech?

Nevyznám se v ... (Locative)

E.g.

Nevyznám se v politice.

[Saim]

Slovak: I started with the slovake.eu course, but I got bored before I finished the A1 level. Besides that I've listened to and shadowed the first 40 minutes of the Slovak dub of the animated film Baby Boss twice. Can't find much transcribed audio, or texts with audio so far...

Arabic: I think I'm going to learn MSA and Levantine together without differentiating them too much or caring about mixing them up or anything. I think this has helped me consolidate vocabulary because most formal terms are identical in Levantine and MSA, I think at this point I have enough if the grammar differences internalised to be able to treat them as two different registers of the same language. I'll keep posting texts I'm working on in my Arabic log; I've noticed that highlighting new words (using the forum's "color" tags) helps me remember them. I've also been going through DLI's Syrian Arabic course, and I cut out all the silence using audacity (making the files go from 30!! to just 6 minutes long; dunno whose idea it was to have more pauses than content).

Turkish: I've been posting annotated texts from LangMedia and song lyrics in my Turkish log. I've taken a break from Colloquial Turkish and the İstanbul yabancilar için course, but hopefully I'll get back to them soon. I've also been doing Glossika, but just shadowing without looking at the PDF much or trying to learn any of the new words (I think I understand enough to just go through it to train the active production of words I do know).

Hebrew: I've started doing song lyrics and subtitled clips from YouTube. I won't bother translating entire texts, though. I've also kept watching the Hebrew dub of the Legend of Korra.

Urdu: I'm going to note down new words from BBC Urdu clips once a week and then spend the rest of the week shadowing the clip I've analysed over and over again. This week I'm doing the first half their interview of the leader of Jamat-e-Islami; the new words I've noted down are in my Urdu log.

German: I printed out several pages of Wikipedia articles on languages and linguistics (using Wikipedia's "create a book" feature). I think intensive reading works better if you use texts on similar topics for a while, because a lot of the vocabulary is bound to repeat itself; I might do the same thing with Hebrew and Hungarian (I'd do it for Urdu as well but I'm not sure how to get Nastaleeq onto the print shop's computer, dunno if even my PDF reader supports it...). I've also listened to a bit of Easy German.

Russian: Glossika and rewatching early episodes of Кухня. Maybe I should do some more writing.

[voron]

I think I'm going to learn MSA and Levantine together without differentiating them too much or caring about mixing them up or anything.

I wholeheartedly support this decision (as you know at some point I arrived to it as well). Just because, learning only one side of the language is boring and demotivating. (Like, if I know things like the difference between jussive and subjunctive in MSA, and a lot of scientific vocabulary, but am not able to understand even basic sentences from how people really talk between themselves, it just doesn't make sense, does it).

[dEhiN]

I think I'm going to learn MSA and Levantine together without differentiating them too much or caring about mixing them up or anything.

I wholeheartedly support this decision (as you know at some point I arrived to it as well). Just because, learning only one side of the language is boring and demotivating. (Like, if I know things like the difference between jussive and subjunctive in MSA, and a lot of scientific vocabulary, but am not able to understand even basic sentences from how people really talk between themselves, it just doesn't make sense, does it).

Yeah I'm facing this same thing with Tamil (I posted about it in the random language thread). I've had 2 lessons with my teacher and already i've learned some words and sentences that my parents don't know/understand. Saim, I think like you, I need to not care about mixing them up or anything because that's the reason why I held off learning both in the first place, and only focused on the Tamil equivalent of MSA.

[vijayjohn]

Russian: Glossika and rewatching early episodes of Кухня. Maybe I should do some more writing.

If you're interested, r/russian has a weekly writing challenge, and there's a native speaker of Russian who goes through everybody's answers correcting people's errors and offering a few more detailed comments.