Saim's log 2017-2019

[reineke]

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

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

Ne znam (se) ...
Ne znam (ja) to
Ne znam se u tome snaći
Ne znam mnogo o tome

[Saim]

Hvala ti reineke.

Logs:
viewtopic.php?f=25&t=48749 (Arabic)
viewtopic.php?f=35&t=50140 (French)
viewtopic.php?f=34&t=42876 (Hebrew)
viewtopic.php?f=63&t=45609 (Hungarian)
viewtopic.php?f=44&t=50117 (Russian)
viewtopic.php?f=62&t=51574 (Turkish)
viewtopic.php?f=71&t=48650 (Urdu)
viewtopic.php?f=130&t=45229 (Punjabi)
viewtopic.php?f=43&t=51967 (Galician)
viewtopic.php?f=86&t=51989 (Slovak)
viewtopic.php?f=30&t=51931 (German)

[eskandar]

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...).

Cool idea. I totally agree about reading texts on similar topics. For Urdu, you can google the free font Jameel Noori Nastaleeq and install that, or just convert your text to Naskh which should be easily printable.

[Saim]

Cool idea. I totally agree about reading texts on similar topics. For Urdu, you can google the free font Jameel Noori Nastaleeq and install that, or just convert your text to Naskh which should be easily printable.

OK, I'll try the font. I don't want to print anything in Naskh because that won't prepare me for reading any printed books or newspapers in Pakistan (I want to be able to immediately recognise common words so I can read quickly).

[eskandar]

That makes sense. I actually have a lot of Urdu books printed in naskh, but you're right to focus on nasta'liq which is obviously the dominant script.

[Saim]

I've been going to Finnish class as a wolny słuhacz. The class is interesting because it's in Polish and it's theoretically for people who are studying Hungarian at master's level (in reality I'm half of the class ), so the teacher talks about Finno-Ugric etymology and cognates in Hungarian. The classes that are actually for my degree are all in English so it's nice being exposed to linguistic terminology in Polish again.

I'm not sure whether to use Glossika because it teaches vernacular Finnish and in my class they've been teaching formal Finnish. Or maybe it doesn't matter? I've heard people talk about Finnish diglossia before but I'm still not sure how big it is...

I've also gone through four lessons in Assimil: le finnois sans peine but I'm having trouble staying focused with it.



I've also been going to Hungarian class (in the same degree program as Finnish) as a wolny słuchacz. I can only go to one out of the two classes a week but I think it'll be good to motivate me to study more on my own anyway (it would be really stupid to let this language go after I've come so far with it). I'm pleasantly surprised by how fluent my Hungarian still is, it hasn't gotten rusty really at all (we talk a lot in this class and I haven't noticed myself stalling or having major trouble expressing myself).

I also watched the Hungarian dub of Trolls with Hungarian subtitles that surprisingly lined up (I found it in a Polish supermarket, it also has dubbing and subtitles for Slovak, Czech and Portuguese).



A couple of days ago I bought a couple of books about politics from a local anarchist bookstore. I haven't read a single one yet but I've leafed through the Polish translation of Bakunin's Appeal to the Slavs.

I've been trying to follow the news in Polish but a lot of the time they've been talking about Catalonia and then I just have to switch over to Catalan media.



I decided to take second-year Arabic as my foreign language credit, at least for this semester. There are five classes a week taught by three different professors who all give different homework and teach different vocabulary groups/work from different texts, so it's been tough to keep up with alongside my actual linguistics subjects. There's also a lot of emphasis on proper vowel marking and reading texts out loud, which I'm not used to.

I've signed up for Glossika's new "AI" program and so far I think it's really helped with Arabic. I found it really boring when I tried to use it for Slovak (I prefer the old GMS system where you would just go through the sentences without spaced repetition, the new "AI" program seems to be more like the GSR I never used) but the spaced repetition is really helpful for Arabic. I'm up to 2615 reps after a couple of days; I'm going to try and get to 2500 by the end of the month and then see whether I want to renew the subscription.

I'll do bits and pieces of Levantine on the side but for the time being my focus is going to be MSA. Turkish is also on hold at the moment because of Arabic and to a lesser extent Finnish (in my mind I put "languages with an enormous cognate discount" and "languages without an enormous cognate discount" into different categories; German, Slovak, French and so on are in the first category and Arabic, Finnish and Turkish in the latter). Maybe next semester if I take less language classes I'll be able to do more Turkish (I only need to have two classes a week for my language credit).



The local language bookstore sells a couple of cheap magazines by Colorfulmedia for learners of these languages (as well as Italian and Spanish). They have articles with glossaries in Polish and free mp3s available on their site. So far I've gone through one issue of French; Russian and German are proving to be tougher nuts to crack!

I might do them on Glossika as well given how expensive the subscription is (why not get my money's worth?), but definitely not as many reps as I'm planning for Arabic.



There are Erasmus students in my Language documentation class from the University of the Balearic Islands; one is Majorcan, one is Valencian, and they both see themselves as Catalans and want independence for the Països Catalans. My spoken Catalan seems to have stayed at the same level, which is nice.

[vijayjohn]

I actually have a lot of Urdu books printed in naskh

I have a few, too (thank you, Nuzzat Auntie!), but they're all children's books.

I've been going to Finnish class as a wolny słuhacz.

I once did that with a seminar (when I was an undergrad) for documentary linguists working on Chatino, a group of Zapotecan languages spoken in southwestern Oaxaca.

I'm pleasantly surprised by how fluent my Hungarian still is, it hasn't gotten rusty really at all (we talk a lot in this class and I haven't noticed myself stalling or having major trouble expressing myself).

Could that be partly because Hungarian is so different and thus not easy to confuse with other languages the way, say, Romance languages are?

I've been trying to follow the news in Polish but a lot of the time they've been talking about Catalonia and then I just have to switch over to Catalan media.

OHMIGOD I HAVE THIS PROBLEM TOO!!! Except with everything in every language, even if I don't actually know the language yet. This is part most of the reason why it's so hard for me to keep up with the news!

Incidentally, what Catalan media do you follow? I happened to look at Google News one day, saw something about Catalonia (obviously), then thought, "I wonder what Catalan media is saying right now!" then looked at what the Wikipedia article on Catalonia said about what Catalan media exists, then saw La Vanguardia and thought, "Oh shit, I forgot all about La Vanguardia!" Then I googled it, clicked on their website, and went half crazy trying to find the Catalan version and read one of their articles.

I'm up to 2615 reps after a couple of days; I'm going to try and get to 2500

The local language bookstore sells a couple of cheap magazines by Colorfulmedia for learners of these languages (as well as Italian and Spanish). They have articles with glossaries in Polish and free mp3s available on their site. So far I've gone through one issue of French; Russian and German are proving to be tougher nuts to crack!

That makes sense. Just last night, I was on r/translator trying to translate some late-1940s German newspaper headlines, and...criminy. And I'm actually kind of used to formal German! Kevin and I started joking about it around the time he posted this.

[Saim]

Could that be partly because Hungarian is so different and thus not easy to confuse with other languages the way, say, Romance languages are?

No, because I probably have about as much passive vocabulary in Hebrew and it's totally rusty. I think it's just the combination of the intensive summer course and explicitly practicing fluency as a separate skill (i.e. shadowing).

Incidentally, what Catalan media do you follow? I happened to look at Google News one day, saw something about Catalonia (obviously), then thought, "I wonder what Catalan media is saying right now!" then looked at what the Wikipedia article on Catalonia said about what Catalan media exists, then saw La Vanguardia and thought, "Oh shit, I forgot all about La Vanguardia!" Then I googled it, clicked on their website, and went half crazy trying to find the Catalan version and read one of their articles.

OHMIGOD I HAVE THIS PROBLEM TOO!!! Except with everything in every language, even if I don't actually know the language yet. This is part most of the reason why it's so hard for me to keep up with the news!

The Vanguardia is a right-wing moderate unionist paper.

Vilaweb (staunchly pro-independence)
l'Ara (centre-Left, mildly pro-independence)
el Racó Català (forums, quite active)
3/24 (24 hour news)
l'Està passant (political satire based on news articles)
el Polònia (political sketch comedy; you can find some individual sketches on Youtube)
Preguntes freqüents (political debate show)

There's also r/Catalunya and r/Barcelona.

[Saim]

I've started using Readlang's Google Chrome app for languages that I can already more or less read. I think I failed to use it properly in the past because I tried it on languages I wasn't good at (like Arabic, or at the time Hungarian), but now I just spent more than an hour straight reading German without breaking a sweat, so I think it's an invaluable resource to help make extensive reading easier (so I'll make sure to use it daily to facilitate extensive reading in languages where it would otherwise be too hard for me, but not for languages where extensive reading is essentially impossible at this point, like say Finnish or Basque).

[vijayjohn]

The Vanguardia is a right-wing moderate unionist paper.

I was afraid you might say something like that.

Vilaweb (staunchly pro-independence)
l'Ara (centre-Left, mildly pro-independence)
el Racó Català (forums, quite active)
3/24 (24 hour news)
l'Està passant (political satire based on news articles)
el Polònia (political sketch comedy; you can find some individual sketches on Youtube)
Preguntes freqüents (political debate show)

Thanks! L'Ara is the only one of these that I see Wiki actually mentioning. (The only other ones it mentions at all are El Periódico de Catalunya and El Punt Avui).

There's also r/Catalunya and r/Barcelona.

I sort of knew about r/Catalunya I've been secretly upvoting all your posts there over the past few months. I'm probably a little overly generous with upvotes but didn't really know about r/Barcelona.

[Luís]

I've started using Readlang's Google Chrome app for languages that I can already more or less read.

Seems like an interesting app. Too bad they don't have a web version that runs on Safari...

Also, I kinda suck at extensive reading. I feel the urge to look up every word I don't know and then add them to Anki...

[dEhiN]

I've started using Readlang's Google Chrome app for languages that I can already more or less read.

That's a cool app! I just checked it out, and I'm going to start using it for French.

Also, I kinda suck at extensive reading. I feel the urge to look up every word I don't know and then add them to Anki...

Hahaha, me too! That's why I've never gotten far with any article/page/book/etc.; I get stuck easily on trying to look up every word I don't know and add it to Anki. (Or at least, every word I don't know and can't figure out from context. Although even words I can figure out, because they're new, I still want to add them to Anki).

I find that's one difficulty I have with Anki: I'm forever wanting to treat it like a dictionary and add every single word that's new to me. I've even, in the past, added words I already know quite well! But for now I've managed to cool down with that desire, and only add words that are new and/or difficult.

[voron]

I feel the urge to look up every word I don't know and then add them to Anki...

That's solved easily: get a paper book and put your phone outside of your immediate reach.

[dEhiN]

I feel the urge to look up every word I don't know and then add them to Anki...

That's solved easily: get a paper book and put your phone outside of your immediate reach.

That solves nothing! I have a notebook where I write new vocabulary and grammar points. But then I feel the need to transfer what I write to Anki, so that I don't end up forgetting it!

[vijayjohn]

Alternative solution: Stop using Anki! Hehehehhhh!

[Luís]

I feel the urge to look up every word I don't know and then add them to Anki...

That's solved easily: get a paper book and put your phone outside of your immediate reach.

Oh, I don't do it right away. I usually underline the words/expressions I'm not familiar with and then will add them in bulk at the end of the day, usually on my computer (because it's faster).

And I always use actual books, I don't like to read from electronic devices.

[dEhiN]

Alternative solution: Stop using Anki! Hehehehhhh!

But, but....how will I remember without an electronic device to help me? How will I learn and study? How will I do anything without my precious electronics?

[Car]

I've started using Readlang's Google Chrome app for languages that I can already more or less read.

Seems like an interesting app. Too bad they don't have a web version that runs on Safari...

Also, I kinda suck at extensive reading. I feel the urge to look up every word I don't know and then add them to Anki...

LingQ's reading app seems to work on Safari.
https://safari-extensions.apple.com/det ... FXD5S9TV5H

I can't check if the link works. Keep in mind that their free version is limited, but as I mentioned before, you can still get a year for ~€18.50 and they have a lot of text with audio themselves. They don't cover as many languages as Readlang, though, but I like the combination of community translations and "built-in" dictionaries better than Readlang's solution.

You can easily look up all words there and review them, but exporting them all to Anki is a bit trickier, apparently (they limited the number of words you can export at once).

Speaking of electronic devices: Apparently, newer Kindles actually remember which words you looked up and let you practise them on the Kindle or export them to programs. My Touch is too old for that, though. I'm already looking up way too much on it, but the dictionaries that come with it are nice, overall well-integrated and you can buy/add lots of others as well.

[Saim]

Alternative solution: Stop using Anki! Hehehehhhh!

BURN ALL YOUR FLASHCARDS.

[vijayjohn]

YES! Exactly!

Dear Fellow Language Nerds:

You do not need linguistic Viagra flashcards a.k.a. flashcards. Or linguistic Cialis a.k.a. Anki. Or, God forbid, linguistic Enzyte. Your linguistic genitals are large enough already.

Yours linguistically,
A Linguistandlanguagewhoreorpossiblylanguagejohn

Alternative solution: Stop using Anki! Hehehehhhh!

But, but....how will I remember without an electronic device to help me? How will I learn and study? How will I do anything without my precious electronics?

Just do what I do and use a computer!