TAC - voron (Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic)

[voron]

Back from Zazaki to my usual languages. Today I did:

2 songs
Rezan - Ey Heval https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vC9-Q-i3g6Y
Elif Biyani - Welatê min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qL-jRTnFVHY


Greetings and pleasantries from Syrian Colloquial

These ones have parallels in Turkish (and there are more):
- الله يعطيك العافية - tr. kolay gelsin, said to anyone who is at work, and may be used as "excuse me" to attract personnel's attention (eg. in a shop). The reply to this is الله يعافيك
- نعيماً - tr. sıhhatler olsun, said to someone who just had a bath, a shave or a haircut. The reply is الله ينعم فيك


I really like songs of this Egyptian rapper Ahmed Mekky.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxCYlG-OyU0

I once said I wouldn't care if I started mixing dialects, but in practice, at this point I'm much more familiar with Syrian, so doing anything in Egyptian takes me a lot more time. (After I study a song's lyrics, I usually listen several times until I start hearing separate words, and with Egyptian it's harder)...

[voron]

Today I did
Langmedia - Weather and Seasons in Syria http://langmedia.fivecolleges.edu/cultu ... Daily-Life

In one sentence the transcript says سوري and it took me a while to realize it has nothing to do with Syrians; it actually meant to represent "sorry" that the guy said in English.

Tomorrow is a Turkish day... I'll use a school textbook (Turkish, 5th grade) and a couple of songs by Ahmet Kaya.
Actually, I'm not sure how much a 5th grade textbook will be useful (and appealing) to me; maybe I should jump directly to high school (grades 8-12). I'll try and see.

[vijayjohn]

In one sentence the transcript says سوري and it took me a while to realize it has nothing to do with Syrians; it actually meant to represent "sorry" that the guy said in English.

There's a cross-linguistic joke in Malayalam where one guy is driving a car and accidentally hits another guy and hurts his arm or something. Then he says, "[ˈsoːri]," obviously meaning the English word sorry. The other guy mishears this as [ˈpoːri], which means 'scratched' (i.e. "oh, I just 'scratched' you"), and goes "what do you mean 'scratched'?! You really broke my arm!"

[voron]

The other guy mishears this as [ˈpoːri]

Nothing can beat Mark and his testicles in the song that you posted in the What made me laugh thread.

[voron]

Actually, I'm not sure how much a 5th grade textbook will be useful (and appealing) to me; maybe I should jump directly to high school (grades 8-12). I'll try and see.

And I've decided not to do them; at least not the Turkish books. They do contain a lot of nice words and collocations (after all they are supposed to enrich the students' Turkish), but ... there is no audio (and I like using audio a lot -- I'm an auditory person), and also, when copy pasted from PDF's the texts lose formatting and it'd be extra fuss to add back paragraph indenting and stuff, so that I can use them in LWT. It's not worth it.

Instead, I've decided just to use short stories from Turkish classics with audio. This facebook group has a nice selection of them:
https://www.facebook.com/SesliEdebiyatY ... esleniyor/

And the story I've chosen for today is
Yaşar Kemal - Beyaz Pantolon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S310aa6bpfQ

[voron]

Today there was a lot of work so I only did this song
Ahmet Kaya - Dosta Düşmana Karşı https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDFV1f6S0Jk

It is full of metaphors and not easy to follow, so it was useful.
Also it taught me a dialectal form of the "-ınca" affix:
Gün kar yanığı yüze vuranda - When the sun hits the frost-bitten face
Debreşir gökçe yürek - The heart will superiorly come back to life.

[voron]

I just got approval from my company to work remotely for as long as I like. I'm toying with the idea of relocating to Turkey's East, and travel the hell out of the region... I'll be able to use all my languages, even Zaza.

One of my concerns is that internet and electricity may not be very stable there.

[vijayjohn]

The other guy mishears this as [ˈpoːri]

Nothing can beat Mark and his testicles in the song that you posted in the What made me laugh thread.

This made me want to see the original Tamil lyrics, and yeah, the buffalaxed version is way more entertaining.

[voron]

This made me want to see the original Tamil lyrics, and yeah, the buffalaxed version is way more entertaining.

If I ever decide to learn Tamil, this will be the song I'll start with.

[voron]

I've been thinking over the approach Karavinka applies to Anki: using only L2->L1 cards (in other words, recognition in favor of recollection).

Seems to be quite effective... but I see a couple of no's against applying it in my situation.

-- For Turkish, my level is high so I can't expect that I will encounter a particular word multiple times in many sources. I should hunt for words and memorize everything new that I come across.

-- For Arabic, due to its vowel-less spelling system, I can easily start recognizing the written shape of the word without even having a clue about how to pronounce it correctly. That's too bad, especially with a dialect (which is all about speaking and comprehension, not reading and writing); the only solution I see is to include romanization on the back of my cards. Then again, I can still have L2 on my card's front and L1 and romanization on my card's back. (I could go for the vowel marks instead of romanization but oh it's such a fuss to type them -- boring, out of option).

These are the contras. Now what are the pros exactly? I can see a bonus of doing through my Anki decks faster -- and that's a good bonus indeed, it leaves time for working on new materials and creation of new cards (and that's probably one of the reasons why Karavinka has accumulated this immense number of cards in such a short period). Anything else?

Currently most of my cards look like this:


This is the default format generated by LWT. The formatting can be customized (both on the LWT side and on the Anki side). You can see that there is a bug with the opening and closing brackets swapped -- it only shows up in Arabic, and can be probably fixed with a bit of tweaking -- but it doesn't bother me.

It's fun how I've turned from an Anki-phobe to an Anki-phile in over just a month. The secret ingredient for me is LWT: I like using it and it makes creation of cards much less boring.

[Luís]

To me sometimes recognition almost feels like cheating...

At the moment, I'm only using it with Hebrew (basic level, different alphabet, no vowels). Ideally, I wanted to do both recognition and recall for that specific deck, but that took me too much time. For languages I know better or that use the Roman alphabet, I basically only use recall.

Overall I think a word sticks in your memory much better if you have to recall it. There's not much use in passively knowing a word if you can't remember it when you actually need it...

[linguoboy]

Overall I think a word sticks in your memory much better if you have to recall it. There's not much use in passively knowing a word if you can't remember it when you actually need it...

That all depends on your goals. Most languages I'm content to simply read. I'm not likely to ever speak Swedish or Dutch, for instance, but there are things I'd like to read in those languages and songs I'd like to listen to that haven't been translated into English and most likely never will be. For that, passive recall is enough.

[Luís]

Yeah, you're right. If passive knowledge of a language is what you're aiming for then recognition is definitely the way to go. I'm not sure if that's voron's case, though.

[Karavinka]

Hapax legomena in Anki decks will always be a problem...

Here are some ideas.

1. Just leave it be. You may forget that one damn word, and it's not a shame to press "again." Eventually it will stick as Anki cards don't go away. It's perfectly fine to delete the damn card altogether as well, if you don't see it worth the trouble.

2. I'm not quite there with Turkish, but what I used to do with German was that when I felt like a word needed more repetition (like I keep forgetting the meaning of that one word that appears only once), I just found another sentence that uses that word and added it. You can arbitrarily make one word less rare in your deck.

3. It's not something I do often, but reschedule the card (so the review cycle starts all over again) and underline that word. Sometimes, just bringing the word to your attention helps. (Do this sparingly though, because once every two cards have underlines, the brain may start ignoring it.)

4. You can just dump a whole bunch of words (in the contexts), and fail half of them. Failing half of 100 new words is still better than struggling with 20 recall cards.

I see it like this... The recall-focused Anki approach will simply require more time for review, and they can become more failure-prone and thus stress-inducing. It's like you're shooting targets in a shooting gallery, and you take time and effort to fire one bullet at a time until you hit the marks. Using massive amount of pure recognition cards is like bringing a machine gun and shooting everything in sight, eventually it's going to hit everything.

And well, you don't need to have a word in 20, 30, 50 cards to be able to recall them. In fact, those that do appear that often tend to have broader semantic field and are more context-sensitive, whereas rarer words usually have narrower definitions, meaning they are often easier to learn and use. Compare: how many uses does the English word "get" have, and how many uses does "icosahedron" have? You only need 1~2 cards to learn "icosahedron", but you might need a couple hundred instances of "get" to really learn to use the word with confidence.

[voron]

Karavinka, you've inspired me for something interesting. I just realized that among my languages there is a language where your recognition-only approach fits perfectly: it's MSA. Just like most Arabs, I only need passive MSA skills.

And I am going to try it with a very special text -- the Quran. It's estimated that there are about 2000 unique roots in the Quran; I'll be able to learn them all in a matter of months. I am so excited!

And sorry Zaza canê min, I'll have to ditch you. Learning 5 languages is too much. I'll return to you one day.

[Karavinka]

Karavinka, you've inspired me for something interesting. I just realized that among my languages there is a language where your recognition-only approach fits perfectly: it's MSA. Just like most Arabs, I only need passive MSA skills.

And I am going to try it with a very special text -- the Quran. It's estimated that there are about 2000 unique roots in the Quran; I'll be able to learn them all in a matter of months. I am so excited!

And sorry Zaza canê min, I'll have to ditch you. Learning 5 languages is too much. I'll return to you one day.

Good luck! And it'd be interesting to see how much the rest of the MSA can get unlocked after learning the Qu'ranic roots.

And I forgot to mention -- don't worry that it's not going to be as effective with Turkish because you're on higher level. While I am slacking with them, the French and German cards where I look up words -- I end up remembering a good amount of them (as in: can recall them) by the time the interval goes over 3 months. Not all, some just won't stick, but I accept the failure rate; if I can eventually recall half of them, that's still a progress.

[vijayjohn]

Aww, poor little Zazaki!

canê min

This reminds me of an old Bollywood song called "Jaaneman Jaaneman" and a Bengali song and a Telugu movie song with the exact same tune.

[voron]

This reminds me of an old Bollywood song called "Jaaneman Jaaneman" and a Bengali song and a Telugu movie song with the exact same tune.

Actually I don't know yet how to say it in Zazaki so I said it in Kurmanji, but I bet it should be similar.

[voron]

So I was wondering, if I ever decide to use the Karavinka/gun-machine/recognition approach to learning MSA, and in particular news in MSA, what resources may I use for sentence mining? I'm only interested in those which have audio.

Euronews (http://www.euronews.com) used to provide all their news videos with transcripts, but now they seem to have abandoned it for Arabic. I just checked for English, Turkish and Russian, and for these three the text repeats the narration in the videos (with some minor deviations), but for Arabic, they are different.

How about Al-Jazeera? I checked a few news videos on their front page, http://www.aljazeera.net/ , and no luck, text and narration are different.

Then I checked their learning portal, http://learning.aljazeera.net/en , and it's even more frustrating: the videos in the "Language of Media" section are accompanied by all kinds of paraphernalia -- vocabulary lists, drag and drop exercises, fill in the missing word exercises, grammar explanations, there is even a button for turning on the subtitles -- but there is no transcript itself! WTF... thought I, and then discovered a little trick: under the video there is a button with the link symbol, clicking on it opens the same video on the main news portal, and most of those do have the transcript.

For example:
'Gaziantep culinary arts center' on Aljazeera Learning, no transcript -- http://learning.aljazeera.net/en//langu ... 8%A7%D8%A8
Same video on Aljazeera main portal with the transcript -- http://www.aljazeera.net/programs/newsr ... 9%83%D9%88

It's still upsetting because their selection of learning videos is small and boring (mostly about culture). Do you guys know any other news websites in Arabic with videos and transcripts?

It's quite annoying to see so many sophisticated websites for Arabic intended to 'help' learners, but such a basic thing missing. Really guys, who needs your drag and drop stuff? Is it even helpful in the slightest?

Good luck! And it'd be interesting to see how much the rest of the MSA can get unlocked after learning the Qu'ranic roots.

Thanks. I don't know for how long I'll be able to persist with it (as you see my Zaza project has ended rapidly -- or rather has been suspended, I hope).

[Antea]

When you say videos with transcript does it mean with subtitles? I am subscribed to different Arabic YouTube channels (mostly news), but I think they don’t have subtitles, or at least I am not aware of it

Maybe you already know the following:

DW in Arabic (Deutsche Welle)
France 24 in Arabic
Al Arabia
Al Aan
Sky news
Al Jazeera
BBC Arabic