TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby vijayjohn » 2020-07-08, 14:29

Saim wrote:
vijayjohn wrote: I brought up how it was pronounced because we were talking at an earlier point about the extent to which Pakistanis pronounce sounds that are foreign to Indo-Iranian languages ([z] was borrowed from Persian, and a lot of Indians replace it with [d͡ʒ]).


Don't you mean Indo-Aryan? :)

Oh shit, yes, I did...I got confused because I made it a point to say "Indo-Iranian" languages instead of "Indo-Aryan" in the previous sentence so I didn't leave Persian out. :P

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby eskandar » 2020-09-09, 1:15

Arabic has basically been on hold lately, though I definitely plan to get back to it when I have more time.

I'm happy with my progress in Hebrew. Looking back at my log, about a year ago I felt I had just about reached B1. I think I'm still more or less there, but now at the high end, getting closer to B2. I've done well with mostly learning through immersion. I need to find a new show (preferably one with short episodes) to watch! The only problem is that, just like when I started learning French and it mostly just screwed up my Spanish for a while, Hebrew has screwed up my Arabic. I said qaṣadtī the other day, basically conjugating the Arabic verb qaṣada according to a Hebrew pattern. :oops:

I'd like to be doing more with Urdu. I like to read something from an Urdu reader before sleeping; finished Gopi Chand Narang's Readings in Literary Urdu Prose and have been reading an Urdu newspaper reader. I'll pick up a novel or some short stories after I finish this one. I downloaded Tandem to try to find some language partners to practice speaking with.
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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby eskandar » 2020-09-29, 3:05

Urdu: Finished Mumtaz Ahmad's Urdu Newspaper Reader. I watched Daawat-e-Ishq which had an exceptionally stupid plot (even considering the genre) but otherwise had some things going for it: good songs, set in my two favorite Indian cities, attention to food and language. It made me wanderlust for Deccani (Hyderabadi Urdu). I might watch some parts of it again without subtitles. Any tips/best practices for using media like this? I'll try to practice my listening comprehension and do a bit of sentence mining as well.

Also watched this interview with the two main actors, which didn't end up being very interesting...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0WQdPAq7ts
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Re: TAC 2017 eskandar

Postby eskandar » 2020-10-02, 1:49

Ser wrote:
colonia - neighborhood

In El Salvador, a colonia is specifically a walled neighborhood with a modicum of collectively paid security. I suspect it
might also mean that in Mexico too. A "neighborhood" is referred to as a barrio or vecindario instead.

I thought of this today when I learned another usage of colonia in Mexico, specifically along the US-Mexico border.
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Re: TAC 2017 eskandar

Postby Bubulus » 2020-10-12, 20:36

eskandar wrote:
Ser wrote:
colonia - neighborhood

In El Salvador, a colonia is specifically a walled neighborhood with a modicum of collectively paid security. I suspect it
might also mean that in Mexico too. A "neighborhood" is referred to as a barrio or vecindario instead.

I thought of this today when I learned another usage of colonia in Mexico, specifically along the US-Mexico border.

In El Salvador, everybody tries to live inside colonias, including, in fact I say especially, those who are better off economically.

What that article calls a colonia is referred to as a zona marginal in Salvadoran Spanish.

Funny how I happened to log in today after many months of inactivity.

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby eskandar » 2020-10-15, 3:23

Arabic: All of the sudden I'm back in the mood to study classical Arabic. I got really excited about the recommendations here because I love the traditional methods of teaching/studying Arabic - it's fun to geek out over the intricacies of ṣarf and naḥw. I decided to start with the lessons on the introduction to al-Ajrumiyya:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzIzySwC8uk&list=PLzGDUA_GfltXkkdq6j5WH98q-4Uy461hB&index=1

I've just done the first lesson and I plan to slowly work through all of them. The teacher is fantastic. I can follow just about every single word, partially because he's a great communicator and breaks down the harder Arabic terms by explaining them in simple Arabic. The lessons are on the commentary al-tuḥfa al-saniyya, so I ordered a hard copy.

I also found this Advanced Arabic Literary Reader for Students of Modern Standard Arabic, which looks promising. I'm excited to start this as well.

I feel like I'm at the point where if I put in some solid work, I can break through into much more confident reading of natural Arabic texts. (Meanwhile Hebrew is still messing with my Arabic production. Today I said shū ṣār ha-yom? :lol: )
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Re: TAC 2017 eskandar

Postby Linguaphile » 2020-10-15, 6:07

eskandar wrote:
Ser wrote:
colonia - neighborhood

In El Salvador, a colonia is specifically a walled neighborhood with a modicum of collectively paid security. I suspect it
might also mean that in Mexico too. A "neighborhood" is referred to as a barrio or vecindario instead.

I thought of this today when I learned another usage of colonia in Mexico, specifically along the US-Mexico border.

The colonias described in that article are along the US-Mexico border in the United States, not in Mexico, and that usage of the word colonia is English (and sometimes border Spanish, influenced by the English usage), not Mexican Spanish. In Mexico, just like in El Salvador, such a place would be called a zona marginal.
In Mexico the word is not so specific to a particular socioeconomic level and does not have any negative (or positive) connotation. I suppose the only assumption that can be made if someone says they live in a colonia in Mexico is that they live in a city as opposed to a small town or rural area. It can be a walled neighborhood (in Mexico that meaning of "colonia" is becoming more common, but it's actually the newer meaning); it's also just a neighborhood of a city, walled or not. Large cities are divided into colonias. I should add that colonias are official divisions of the city; the colonia name is part of the address. Maybe that's why they are only in large cities; when the city is so large that you need to further subdivide it for sorting mail and other such things, you get colonias. An envelope addressed to a recipient in a large city in Mexico would have the recipient's name followed by the street and building number, followed by the colonia, followed by the postal code and then the city. So it's a neighborhood or district with very official, defined boundaries, in a large city.
Sono di continuo a caccia di parole. Descriverei il processo così: Ogni giorno entro in un bosco con un cestino in mano. Trovo le parole tutt'attorno: sugli alberi, nei cespugli, per terra (in realtà: per la strada, durante la conversazioni, mentre leggo). Ne raccolgo quante più possibile. -Jhumpa Lahiri

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby voron » 2020-10-25, 1:08

eskandar wrote:because I love the traditional methods of teaching/studying Arabic - it's fun to geek out over the intricacies of ṣarf and naḥw

I like digging into details too, but when I tried learning the grammar using the Arabic terminology, it turned to be too confusing. All those maful bihi, majrur, majzum etc are too difficult to memorize in comparison with familiar terms like indirect object, genitive case or conjunctive mood.

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby vijayjohn » 2020-12-01, 16:29

If you're getting interested in Dakhini, then maybe I can finally lure you into Ankur. :whistle: (It doesn't even have all that much Dakhini in it! Some of the villagers in the movie are really hard to understand, though, especially men talking to each other).

Also can you give me some feedback in the Persian study group? :doggy:

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby eskandar » 2022-01-21, 21:15

Back on here, at least for now. I've mostly been working on Hebrew and I feel like I'm solidly moving into B2 territory (maybe?) in speaking. My listening comprehension and active production is pretty good. I can usually converse fairly fluently although there's lots of advanced vocabulary I still end up reaching for. I would estimate my active vocabulary to be around 4000 words. My reading skills are definitely less advanced, but I'm reading the graphic novel מנהרות now and enjoying it, looking up a few words per page, sometimes more when the vocabulary gets technical. I'm also slowly chipping away at the Streetwise Hebrew podcast, have listened to 93 episodes so far.

I think my learning strategy for Hebrew (focused exclusively on speaking for the first few years until I got very comfortable with that, now adding reading), which was more ad hoc than deliberate, has actually served me well. I wouldn't pursue this strategy for a language with a more transparent orthography, since there reading and speaking can reinforce each other, but with Hebrew, I found that when I started trying to read, I already knew most of the words I was reading and it was simply a matter of recognizing them, which makes reading an abjad much less of a chore. In a way it's kind of like the experience of a native speaker learning to read for the first time as a child. I also managed to skip learning the niqqud altogether and still have no idea what any of them mean.

I have been reading some Urdu poetry lately and will hopefully get back to reading more Urdu prose as well. Haven't done as much with other languages (Arabic, French/Spanish/Italian, Turkish) lately.

Thinking of taking up German and Yiddish in the second half of 2022.
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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-01-23, 21:02

I've been reading at least one book in each of those languages except Hebrew, Italian, and Yiddish (and also specifically poetry by Ahmad Faraz in the case of Urdu), but I've also been in touch on a near-daily basis with some Israelis lately, so I'm inclined to try to improve my Hebrew as well.

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby Saim » 2022-01-24, 9:01

That's great to hear Eskandar, kol hakavod! I'm jealous; I haven't done much for Hebrew in ages. I should get back into it, although most of the times I think that I end up doing some Arabic or Turkish. :lol:

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-01-24, 14:59

I haven't, either, actually; I think most of the Hebrew I've heard comes from just watching Corey Gil-Shuster's videos. They seem less useful for Arabic because the Arabic-speakers are often more difficult to hear, either because they're in noisier environments or they mumble a lot or both, and conversations with them are not as natural since Corey can't really speak Arabic. Every line in the conversation is a paragraph translated from English to Arabic or vice versa.

Maybe I'll go back to Colloquial Hebrew and Colloquial Amharic.

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby eskandar » 2022-01-26, 4:03

vijayjohn wrote:I've been reading at least one book in each of those languages

Cool, what are the books?

Saim wrote:That's great to hear Eskandar, kol hakavod! I'm jealous; I haven't done much for Hebrew in ages. I should get back into it, although most of the times I think that I end up doing some Arabic or Turkish. :lol:

Toda! Studying Hebrew and Arabic together has been super fruitful for me. Pretty much whenever I learn a new root in one, I get curious to check and see if there are cognates in the other. Why not do both at once? :twisted:

vijayjohn wrote:Maybe I'll go back to Colloquial Hebrew and Colloquial Amharic.

Seems like that would be similarly fruitful, though I guess Amharic is not as close to Hebrew as Arabic is. I am sorely tempted to pick up another Semitic language, but I'll hold off until I'm where I want to be with Hebrew and Arabic.
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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-01-26, 16:10

eskandar wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:I've been reading at least one book in each of those languages

Cool, what are the books?

نابینا شہر میں آئینہ by Ahmad Faraz. My dad's roommate in grad school was a Muslim guy from Bihar who's really into poetry and has composed some poems in Urdu himself. He sent me this book and another book of poetry by his brother-in-law just before I left for Taiwan.
ألف ليلة وليلة (there seem to be multiple versions of this in Arabic, and I think the edition I have is missing some parts :hmm:)
Ourika (basically a novella by a 19th-century French aristocratic woman questioning the morality of racism)
La muerte de Artemio Cruz
Kızlarıma Mektuplar
, a set of letters by a Turkish professor to his daughters I think after they grew up and left to study abroad
Querschnitt: Dichter des Zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, basically a collection of 20th-century German short stories
And a bunch of Uncle Scrooge stories in German (with somewhat detailed plot lines!) from the 90s :P

I actually also bought a novel in Hebrew last year, shortly after I came back from Taiwan. It's called גוף ראשון רבים and is by Nathan Shaham.
Toda! Studying Hebrew and Arabic together has been super fruitful for me. Pretty much whenever I learn a new root in one, I get curious to check and see if there are cognates in the other. Why not do both at once? :twisted:

I kept doing this with Hebrew, but honestly, it really bogged me down because there often just aren't cognates. :doggy:
vijayjohn wrote:Maybe I'll go back to Colloquial Hebrew and Colloquial Amharic.

Seems like that would be similarly fruitful, though I guess Amharic is not as close to Hebrew as Arabic is. I am sorely tempted to pick up another Semitic language, but I'll hold off until I'm where I want to be with Hebrew and Arabic.

Well, this is me we're talking about, so my plan is basically to just study every Semitic language I can get my hands on (more like every language, period, but that's less relevant in context). :lol:

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby eskandar » 2022-01-26, 17:42

vijayjohn wrote:ألف ليلة وليلة (there seem to be multiple versions of this in Arabic, and I think the edition I have is missing some parts :hmm:)

Multiple versions is an understatement! There's no canonical Urtext, just infinite variations and translations of translations, so I wouldn't worry too much about which version it is as long as you enjoy it. :)

La muerte de Artemio Cruz

¡Qué casualidad! Acabo de comprarlo este mismo mes. El espejo enterrado de Fuentes fue la primera novela que leí en español, hace mas de 15 años. ¿Debo leerlo?

Kızlarıma Mektuplar, a set of letters by a Turkish professor to his daughters I think after they grew up and left to study abroad

Sounds cool, wish my Turkish were up to something like that.

I actually also bought a novel in Hebrew last year, shortly after I came back from Taiwan. It's called גוף ראשון רבים and is by Nathan Shaham.

What's it about?
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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-01-26, 19:58

eskandar wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:ألف ليلة وليلة (there seem to be multiple versions of this in Arabic, and I think the edition I have is missing some parts :hmm:)

Multiple versions is an understatement! There's no canonical Urtext, just infinite variations and translations of translations, so I wouldn't worry too much about which version it is as long as you enjoy it. :)

Well, my version was kind of confusing at first, because it begins with a ملك من ملوك ساسان بجزائر الهند والصين and I was confused because how was a Sassanid king on multiple Indian and Chinese islands at the same time? :lol: The version I see on Wikisource seems to make much more sense: ملك من ملوك ساسان بمغرب الهند والسند صاحب.
La muerte de Artemio Cruz

¡Qué casualidad! Acabo de comprarlo este mismo mes. El espejo enterrado de Fuentes fue la primera novela que leí en español, hace mas de 15 años. ¿Debo leerlo?

Desafortunadamente, no lo conozco. :hmm: Pero si quieres leerlo, ¿por qué no? :lol:
Kızlarıma Mektuplar, a set of letters by a Turkish professor to his daughters I think after they grew up and left to study abroad

Sounds cool, wish my Turkish were up to something like that.

I'm not entirely sure mine is! With most of the books I read in any language at this point, I find that I usually have no idea what I'm reading. :P (This happens in Malayalam, too. I'm sure it's happened to me several times in English). But at least I'm getting better at reading in those languages!
I actually also bought a novel in Hebrew last year, shortly after I came back from Taiwan. It's called גוף ראשון רבים and is by Nathan Shaham.

What's it about?

I have absolutely no idea. :lol:

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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby eskandar » 2022-01-26, 23:02

vijayjohn wrote:Desafortunadamente, no lo conozco. :hmm: Pero si quieres leerlo, ¿por qué no? :lol:

Tal vez no me expliqué bien. Fuentes es el autor de La muerte de Artemio Cruz. La primera novela que leí en español fue otro libro de él. Acabo de comprar La muerte de Artemio Cruz, así que tal vez me pongo a leerlo.
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Re: TAC eskandar (Arabic, Hebrew, Urdu)

Postby vijayjohn » 2022-01-28, 5:12

eskandar wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Desafortunadamente, no lo conozco. :hmm: Pero si quieres leerlo, ¿por qué no? :lol:

Tal vez no me expliqué bien. Fuentes es el autor de La muerte de Artemio Cruz. La primera novela que leí en español fue otro libro de él. Acabo de comprar La muerte de Artemio Cruz, así que tal vez me pongo a leerlo.

¡Ah, perdón, no prestaba bastante atención leyendo lo que escribiste! :doh:

Se cuenta que La muerte de Artemio Cruz es muy difícil leer porque la narración es muy complicada. A mí no me importa, leo tantos libros hoy día sin entender la trama. :whistle:


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