Saim wrote:I think it's time to bury the fantasy that I'm ever going to read novels in foreign languages,
What's stopping you?
Moderators:''', Forum Administrators
Saim wrote:I think it's time to bury the fantasy that I'm ever going to read novels in foreign languages,
eskandar wrote:How much experience do you have with reading Hindi and Punjabi?
And what types of Urdu materials do you want to be able to read more comfortably?
IIRC it's the more formal register of the language, with more Perso-Arabic vocabulary, that you wanted to work on - seems like the register that would be the least help with Hindi. Even though you're more interested in nonfiction, as you mentioned a few posts back, I guess fiction would suit this purpose best, especially stories by Urdu writers who tried to approximate spoken Hindustani in their writing. I have the opposite problem - it's all the very specific Indic verbs in Urdu that usually send me to the dictionary - and I encounter those most often in fiction, whereas scholarly writing and (for the most part) newspapers tend to be much easier for me to read.
Yasna wrote:Saim wrote:I think it's time to bury the fantasy that I'm ever going to read novels in foreign languages,
What's stopping you?
Saim wrote:[1] It seems this website doesn't exist anymore, which is a shame since they had lots of the same texts in both Gurmukhi and Shahmukhi, and some even with audio.
The thing is my difficulty in reading Urdu is not just the vocabulary, it's the entire language system -- script, syntax, general writing style, everything.
it's kind of scandalous that I still don't have a reliable, easy way to print out nastaleeq texts
eskandar wrote:Wow, that's weird. Does something go wrong when printing nasta'liq stuff from the web? (It usually works fine for me..) Have you tried dumping stuff into Word and switching the font to Jameel Noori Nastaleeq or something? Also, you could try looking through the Annual of Urdu Studies archives for interesting things to read in the Urdu section. It's all in nicely-formatted PDFs written in nasta'liq for easy printing. This article (by a Turkish professor of Urdu, no less - I think we've talked about him before) might interest you, for one example.
Saim wrote:Novels take a lot of concentration, are pretty long and I find that my tolerance for noise is lower since the point is to get immersed in a story rather than understand a concrete message (unlike reading the news or whatever).
Yasna wrote:Saim wrote:Novels take a lot of concentration, are pretty long and I find that my tolerance for noise is lower since the point is to get immersed in a story rather than understand a concrete message (unlike reading the news or whatever).
Have you tried detective novels? Titles like Män som hatar kvinnor or 容疑者Xの献身 (The Devotion of Suspect X) are usually gripping enough to keep you in the zone, even if they're not great literature.
Yasna wrote:Saim wrote:Novels take a lot of concentration, are pretty long and I find that my tolerance for noise is lower since the point is to get immersed in a story rather than understand a concrete message (unlike reading the news or whatever).
Have you tried detective novels? Titles like Män som hatar kvinnor or 容疑者Xの献身 (The Devotion of Suspect X) are usually gripping enough to keep you in the zone, even if they're not great literature.
Saim wrote:eskandar wrote:[...]
EDIT2: I managed to make a pdf by printing a bunch of articles I put into Unilang's post editor and then clicked 'preview' (I have an add-on that converts texts to nastaleeq). It's a really round about way to do it it but it works so far. Let's see if the xero's computer will read the pdf properly. If not I'll bite the bullet and read in naskh, I guess that's better than nothing.
Ciarán12 wrote:I recently started following a rule whereby I'm not allowed to use my phone (or laptop, or any electronic device) in bed at night, and instead I use that time to read. It's been working well for me and my wife, we're reading a lot more that we used to, and noise isn't so much an issue because it's the end of the day so the road outside is quiet, neighbours are asleep and we don't have our phones/TV on. I don't know what your living circumstances are at the moment so maybe it's a bit noisier where you are...?
Saim wrote:Ciarán12 wrote:I recently started following a rule whereby I'm not allowed to use my phone (or laptop, or any electronic device) in bed at night, and instead I use that time to read. It's been working well for me and my wife, we're reading a lot more that we used to, and noise isn't so much an issue because it's the end of the day so the road outside is quiet, neighbours are asleep and we don't have our phones/TV on. I don't know what your living circumstances are at the moment so maybe it's a bit noisier where you are...?
Oh, I didn't literally mean noise, I mean metaphorically as in a signal-to-noise ratio, like parts of the text (words or expression) I don't fully understand. When I'm reading non-fiction I don't get as annoyed when I miss some nuances or can't fully understand something than when reading fiction.
Saim wrote:It worked! I read through the whole Toker article in one setting, which is the most I've ever read in Urdu at once.
Ciarán12 wrote:Haha, ah, okay, got it. I see your point. I think it's probably a matter of choosing novels that are at your current reading level, which is of course difficult because how can you know if you can read it before you try... I'd say the difficulty also depends on the language - some languages (IME at least) diverge from English in their idioms than others. What languages have you been trying to read fiction in?
eskandar wrote:Saim wrote:It worked! I read through the whole Toker article in one setting, which is the most I've ever read in Urdu at once.
!شاباش
Looking up these works on Wiktionary I found the following example sentences, which I also added to Anki with GT-produced audio:
笔在桌上。The pen is on the desk.
请上车。Please get into the car.
请等待。Please wait.
我們必須等待。We must wait.
نُمائِش
۱۔ ظہور ، اظہار ، نمود ؛ تماشا ۲۔ (i) دکھانے کا عمل ، دکھانا نیز نظر آنا (iv) (مجازاً) دھوم دھام ، شان و شوکت نیز سجاوٹ ، زیبائش
ظُہُور - manifestation, act of appearance
نُمود - appearance, visibleness
نِیز - also, even, again
دھوم دھام - pomp and show
شَوکت - pomp, grandeur, dignity
سجاوٹ - adornment, decoration
زیبائش (zebɑɪʃ)- adornment, decoration
Saim wrote:Mandarin
I've decided to do screencaps of lessons from Le chinois sans peine and cut out the characters so I'm not relying on the pinyin and translation to understand the text. I think I will do this as a character recognition exercise on days when I don't have any flashcard reviews for Mandarin. First I will try and read it aloud without listening to the audio, then I will read it along with the audio.
My main goal is to associate the characters with phonetic information so I slowly develop an internal reading voice for Mandarin that will make it easier to use reading to study at a later date, and this is the best way I can think of doing that.
I don't have the time or energy to do much handwriting: I'll keep using the Heisig book but I can't see myself doing it every or almost every day. I'll treat it more the way I'd treat a learner's grammar; i.e., as something to skim through and make notes out of rather than as a primary study resource.
Saim wrote:I've been really enjoying Turkish lately, and feel like I'm getting close to a breakthrough, inching towards a more solidly intermediate level of comprehension.
voron wrote:Saim wrote:I've been really enjoying Turkish lately, and feel like I'm getting close to a breakthrough, inching towards a more solidly intermediate level of comprehension.
That's so cool!
If you listen to any Turkish songs, post the links here.
Return to “Language Logs and Blogs”
Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 16 guests