TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

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

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-06, 16:44

voron wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Or maybe it's their dialogues in general.

Yeah maybe.

The dialogues in Syrian Colloquial are great, but their disadvantage is that all together they sum up to 10 mins of audio at most. It's definitely too little to develop an ear for the language.

Also, you get used to the specific dialogue pretty quickly. :P

"Oh, you're married? Do you have any kids?"
"No, we don't. We have a cat." :lol:

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

Postby voron » 2017-12-10, 13:44

So as the New Year is approaching, it's time to make New Year's resolutions and plans. :)

Next year it's going to be the same 3 languages for me (what a surprise!)

For Turkish, I want to take an exam in January and get a C1 or C2. (Currently there's a bit of an issue with my passport, I hope I'll sort it out and be able to apply).

For Arabic, I want to finally start talking (in the Levantine dialect). With anyone I want and about anything I want. No more no less. If I have enough time and money I want to take a trip to Beirut.

For Kurdish, no special goals, I'll just continue my routine of doing occasional songs and videos, and trying to engage in conversations. I'll maybe take a trip to the East of Turkey also known as Northern or Turkish Kurdistan, but I should be careful to not use this name in Turkey.
Last edited by voron on 2017-12-30, 12:19, edited 1 time in total.

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

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-10, 17:42

Good luck with all your plans for next year! :)

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

Postby voron » 2017-12-11, 0:13

vijayjohn wrote:Good luck with all your plans for next year! :)

Thanks a lot Vijay! :partyhat:

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

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-11, 4:54

No problem! Now I guess I'll have to figure out what my plans for next year are...eventually. But then they're almost always the same. :lol:

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

Postby voron » 2017-12-12, 15:19

This is a fun resource - Fairy Tales in multiple languages
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-8DEb ... SMhXQIpoNw

This link is to the Kurdish channel, and in its Featured channels list you can see other languages as well.

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

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-12, 20:21

The BBC used to have something like this, too, except in print and with English translations. I wonder whether they're still available somewhere online.

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

Postby voron » 2017-12-29, 16:11

My application for the Turkish exam was confirmed; so I am going to Ankara to take it in just 2 weeks! :partyhat:

I have already made my plans for 2018 so there is not much to add this year. Perhaps I should share more the materials I study from, the new words I encounter and stuff like that. Unfortunately there is not much interest to Kurdish here - the language I would like to post about the most.

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

Postby vijayjohn » 2017-12-29, 16:42

So? There is almost no explicit interest in Malayalam. That sure doesn't stop me from posting about it. :D

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

Postby Karavinka » 2017-12-30, 10:44

Good luck! And you should be immortalized in the Unilang Book of Records as the Longest Determined Total Annihilation Challenger. :D

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

Postby voron » 2017-12-30, 12:59

Karavinka wrote:Good luck! And you should be immortalized in the Unilang Book of Records as the Longest Determined Total Annihilation Challenger.

Thanks. I am now in Turkey again, and it's very easy to stay focused on the same languages when you are constantly reminded about your weak points (by living your life through the language; as all 3 of my TAC languages are spoken in my neighbourhood).

For Turkish, I am now seriously thinking about improving my pronunciation. I am at a point where everything I say is quite natural and if it were not for the accent people would not be able to tell (at least not immediately) that I am not a native speaker. But my accent gives me away immediately. I have already made the first step towards it by recording myself and identifying the sounds (I think) I say wrong, and trying to articulate them properly. And to my dismay I also noticed in my recordings that I have traces of Russian vowel reduction when speaking Turkish. Who would think... the way I speak sounds very differently in my head than in my recordings; so I am now trying to be more careful with my vowels as well.

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

Postby voron » 2018-01-09, 9:32

For the last few days, several people, after talking to me for a couple minutes, suddenly asked me "Are you a Turk?" I take it as a good sign (it means it wasn't obvious for them from my accent if I was or wasn't a Turk, and perhaps if not for my Slavic look they wouldn't have doubted at all?..)

I am thinking about dedicating January-June to Kurdish only. I know I have made great plans for Arabic, but there appears to be more opportunities to actively use my Kurdish at the moment, so maybe I should use them.

How should I proceed about Kurdish?.. There is this problem that if I start using all the standard media (literarure and newspapers), and use all the academic words from there, people will stop understanding me. I witnessed it several times that simple folk couldn't understand people who used the standard Kurdish.

I will probably still buy and do the third book of the "Hinker" series, and then I should find a balance between academic and non-academic sources so that I increase my vocabulary on both levels.

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

Postby vijayjohn » 2018-01-09, 9:38

voron wrote:For the last few days, several people, after talking to me for a couple minutes, suddenly asked me "Are you a Turk?" I take it as a good sign (it means it wasn't obvious for them from my accent if I was or wasn't a Turk, and perhaps if not for my Slavic look they wouldn't have doubted at all?..)

Yay! :)

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

Postby voron » 2018-01-22, 19:06

I've installed Anki and played a bit with converting my LWT texts into cloze deletion Anki cards. They look neat on my Android:
Image

(The backs of my Kurdish cards are in Turkish, and my phone's language is set to Turkish, too).

This gave me 2 decks:
Kurdish - 134 cards
Arabic - 223 cards.

Most of the cards are from songs.

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

Postby Luís » 2018-01-22, 19:37

voron wrote:(The backs of my Kurdish cards are in Turkish, and my phone's language is set to Turkish, too).


Interestingly enough, the name of the deck itself is in English :)
Quot linguas calles, tot homines vales

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

Postby voron » 2018-01-23, 1:30

Luís wrote:Interestingly enough, the name of the deck itself is in English :)

:whistle:

I think it will make sense if I try and assign days of week each a specific language; because when I sit to study, I want to study everything at once and keep switching there and back.

Monday is Kurdish
Tuesday is Arabic
Wednesday is Turkish
Thursday is Classical Arabic
Friday is Kurdish
Saturday is Arabic
Sunday is Turkish

So tomorrow is an Arabic day. I am excited! I will try to:
- finish parsing that rap song about Syria by Ismail Tamr that I added to LWT quite a while ago
- watch 1 episode of a Syrian internet series about the revolution.

Karavinka

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

Postby Karavinka » 2018-01-23, 3:54

voron wrote:I've installed Anki and played a bit with converting my LWT texts into cloze deletion Anki cards. They look neat on my Android:
Image

(The backs of my Kurdish cards are in Turkish, and my phone's language is set to Turkish, too).

This gave me 2 decks:
Kurdish - 134 cards
Arabic - 223 cards.

Most of the cards are from songs.


How does this work? The front has Kurdish with cloze, and the back is Turkish... I mean, where do you keep the answer for the clozed portion?


voron wrote:I think it will make sense if I try and assign days of week each a specific language; because when I sit to study, I want to study everything at once and keep switching there and back.


Don't sue me if I steal this idea

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

Postby voron » 2018-01-23, 12:42

Karavinka wrote:How does this work? The front has Kurdish with cloze, and the back is Turkish... I mean, where do you keep the answer for the clozed portion?

It was just a sloppy wording. I was having in mind a traditional card with a word on the front and its translation on the back; I rather meant that the translation is in Turkish.


Karavinka wrote:Don't sue me if I steal this idea

You're welcome.

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

Postby voron » 2018-01-23, 14:57

I've added a Turkish song to the lyricstraining website (just because I was bored).
The song is Yanıyoruz by Burak King. The city where the video was filmed is the magnificent Mardin.

https://lyricstraining.com/tr/play/bura ... HRFPTX6TzR

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

Postby voron » 2018-01-23, 17:16

A random note about Arabic:

عَاد، يْعِيْد - to repeat
عِيْد كَلَامَك - Repeat what you said.

عَاد، يْعُوْد - to return, go back
عَادَت حَلِّمِة لَعَادِتهَا القَدِيْمِة - Halima has returned to her old habits.

Their past tenses are identical...


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