Wanderlust support group 5

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księżycowy
Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby księżycowy » 2019-02-10, 11:35

vijayjohn wrote:Of course! I'm trying to do everything.

Crazy bastard. :silly:

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby kevin » 2019-02-10, 21:43

Lur wrote:I find that I don't know enough about Gaelic languages to know if I'd prefer Scottish Gaelic or Ulster Irish or Connacht Irish or Munster Irish or something like Early Modern Irish or...

Just start somewhere in the middle and pick up the others later. In the end they are all dialects of the same language, so by the time you master one of them, you probably already have a pretty good understanding of the others.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-02-11, 4:02

księżycowy wrote:
vijayjohn wrote:Of course! I'm trying to do everything.

Crazy bastard. :silly:

As a native(?) speaker of Dinka once said on this forum about my attempt to learn Dinka: "absolute maaadman."

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Yasna » 2019-02-11, 6:14

Saim wrote:Go for it! With your level of German it shouldn't be too hard to just jump into reading and listening, right?

I already have about two lifetimes worth of must-have languages (the ones in my profile), so adding any more without a really good reason is out of the question. I do allow myself to play with wanderlust languages for 15 minutes here or there though, and that mostly satisfies the crave.
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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby vijayjohn » 2019-02-11, 7:07

I always mispronounce and make dumb mistakes in both languages.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Lur » 2019-02-13, 10:36

Western Apache. Again.

Yasna wrote:I already have about two lifetimes worth of must-have languages (the ones in my profile), so adding any more without a really good reason is out of the question. I do allow myself to play with wanderlust languages for 15 minutes here or there though, and that mostly satisfies the crave.

The ones I put there are pretty much a list of typical wanderlusts for me although they can change with time.
Geurea dena lapurtzen uzteagatik, geure izaerari uko egiteagatik.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Ciarán12 » 2019-02-16, 17:30

Goddamn Langfocus, now I'm wanderlusting for Persian. Fortunately, I have no real interest in (because I have very little knowledge of) the associated culture, it's more of a raw, carnal, animal lust for the delicious grammar and phonology of the language. It will pass.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby n8an » 2019-02-18, 12:01

Luís wrote:I'm currently watching Fauda (an Israeli TV series) and half the dialogues are actually in (Palestinian) Arabic. I'm amazed at how many words I can pick up simply because they sound similar to their Hebrew equivalents (and my Hebrew vocabulary is rather limited, a fluent Hebrew speaker might understand a lot more)

So, yeah, now I'm wanderlusting for Arabic


HOW GOOD IS FAUDA? :D

As for the dialogue, I can't really say how much of the Arabic is intelligible to a Hebrew speaker since I already have so much exposure to Arabic. But I do remember back in the day before I ever studied any Arabic that I could pick up a lot of words from Arabic songs. That's actually how I came to learn Arabic in the first place :D an obsession was born, so to speak. Haha

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby n8an » 2019-02-18, 12:06

After studying Greek for a month or two pretty consistently, I've kind of gone back to Russian. I'm making some decent progress, though I'm forever getting tripped up by the aspect pairs (especially when it comes to remembering the stems of each), verbs of motion and other stereotypically difficult things.

When I learn Russian, I always wanderlust Polish. I just really dislike the Polish TY book I have. If I had a better book, I might go down that path. But I suppose I also wanderlust Slovak, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Bulgarian and...everything :D

I always wanderlust Hindi, Greek, Assyrian and various Turkic languages. I think Assyrian is the most consistent since I'm around Assyrians the most and it just frustrates me how similar their language is to Hebrew but I still can't understand it :silly:

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Saim » 2019-02-18, 14:06

Finnish?? :shock:

n8an wrote:After studying Greek for a month or two pretty consistently, I've kind of gone back to Russian. I'm making some decent progress, though I'm forever getting tripped up by the aspect pairs (especially when it comes to remembering the stems of each), verbs of motion and other stereotypically difficult things.


I don't think you should really worry that much about the aspect pairs, it's something you just end up picking up over lots of time. There are moments where there can be misunderstadnings (especially in North Slavic since the basic conjugations of the perfective verbs usually have an implied future meaning), but in general it's not something you should try to rote learn or whatever.

I think Assyrian is the most consistent since I'm around Assyrians the most and it just frustrates me how similar their language is to Hebrew but I still can't understand it :silly:


If you're around them so often surely you could try practicing with them?

Yasna wrote:I already have about two lifetimes worth of must-have languages (the ones in my profile), so adding any more without a really good reason is out of the question. I do allow myself to play with wanderlust languages for 15 minutes here or there though, and that mostly satisfies the crave.


Fair enough!

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Antea » 2019-02-18, 15:37

This weekend I was just obsessed with Assyrian. And yes, I think it's because of Hebrew :hmm:

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby n8an » 2019-02-19, 0:45

Saim wrote:I don't think you should really worry that much about the aspect pairs, it's something you just end up picking up over lots of time. There are moments where there can be misunderstadnings (especially in North Slavic since the basic conjugations of the perfective verbs usually have an implied future meaning), but in general it's not something you should try to rote learn or whatever.


I hope so. The Penguin book I'm using does start to ask you to use them in their subtle intricacies, especially with regards to imperatives and stuff like that where it really trips me up.

If you're around them so often surely you could try practicing with them?


I do a bit, though my Assyrian friends are either a) born and raised here, and have quite an unenthusiastic attitude to their language (if they even speak it with confidence) or b) born and raised in Iraq/Syria/Iran/Turkey and either speak it super fast with each other and don't understand why anybody else would want to learn their language, or prefer to work on their English. I guess the second group is the more likely to help me out, but it's pretty difficult - I haven't found any who are even slightly willing to help me with anything beyond a few words. I show them the books I use and stuff, and they hardly even care. I think it probably has a lot to do with the suppression of their language and identity in their homeland. I guess I need to be more persistent.

It's such a weird sensation with Assyrian, because many times they don't pronounce letters in words and their grammar is different in unusual ways.

For example:

You did/did you = "widlookh" (in the non-Iranian dialects of Assyrian)

You did/did you = "asita" (in Hebrew)

No connection here.

But let's break it down into two parts.

Part 1:

You discover that the word "wid" ("do") comes from the root "ayin - bet/vet/wet - dalet/dalat", or ܥ - ܒ - ܕ, which corresponds to Hebrew's ע – ב – ד (work).

The first letter, "ayin", is completely silent in the Assyrian word, while it is pronounced "a" in Hebrew. The second letter, "bet/vet" or "bet/wet", is pronounced "w" in Iraqi/Syrian Assyrian and "v" in Hebrew. The third letter, "dalet" or "dalat" is pronounced "d" or "dh" in Assyrian, and "d" in Hebrew.

So really, you have 2/3 parts of the root that are unrecognisable when spoken, plus the slightly different meaning of "do/make" in Assyrian vs "work" in Hebrew.

The second part, "lookh", is the past tense "conjugation" (is this the right term?) for masculine second person singular. It seems to mean "by you" when suffixed to a root in past tense. In Hebrew, it corresponds to "lekha", meaning "to you" or "for you". Hebrew conjugates past tense masculine singular second person verbs with "-ta" as the suffix, like Arabic.

So really, Assyrian "widlookh" corresponds to something like "avadlekha" (which doesn't really mean anything as one word, but kind of could indicate that something else "worked for you", in the sense of trying something and it working - maybe as in "did this remote control work for you?") in Hebrew...which has no meaningful relation. That's not a very easy connection to make in realtime spoken language :nope:

There's also the whole thing of the existence of the verb "to be" in the present tense of Assyrian, which doesn't exist in Hebrew or Arabic. So in Hebrew, "I am Jewish" is "Ani yehudi", but in Assyrian "Ana eewin hudaya' (not the silent "ye-" at the start of "hudaya").

This occurs with all other verbs - Assyrian's "ana eewin kthawa" corresponds to Hebrew's "Ani kotev", or "ana bayin chay" vs. "ba li teh". They even include it in negation, so "I am not Assyrian" is "lewin Suraya" vs. Hebrew's "ana lo Ashuri".

That's along with things like "year" in Hebrew being "shana" but "sheta" in Assyrian because of the silent "nun", while "shena" means "tooth" in Assyrian.

It does get a bit easier as you go on, but it's a major headf*** for the most part.

I know this is true of all languages, but for two languages that are so closely related, there's a lot that makes it hard to learn one from the other.

Antea wrote:This weekend I was just obsessed with Assyrian. And yes, I think it's because of Hebrew :hmm:


You should totally go for it :D

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Luís » 2019-02-19, 9:29

n8an wrote:HOW GOOD IS FAUDA? :D


It's not bad. I'm currently watching season 2. Not sure if I'd watch it if I weren't learning Hebrew, though.
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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby n8an » 2019-02-20, 3:01

Luís wrote:It's not bad. I'm currently watching season 2. Not sure if I'd watch it if I weren't learning Hebrew, though.


Oh man, I love it. Not all of it, though.

How are you finding the Hebrew elements? Easy to follow?

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Bubulus » 2019-02-20, 19:46

My Swahili + Yucatec fever seems to have passed. Good thing I didn't start study groups for them. :wink:

Now it's Inuktitut.

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Luís » 2019-02-21, 9:26

I'll be going to Italy again in April, so naturally I'm wanderlusting for Italian now. Too bad Ipsedixit is not around anymore... :(

n8an wrote:How are you finding the Hebrew elements? Easy to follow?


I can understand a lot of it, yeah. But my level of Hebrew is not that high anyway. Sometimes I can understand whole sentences easily, sometimes I don't understand anything for several minutes... :P
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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby OldBoring » 2019-02-21, 13:16

Where in Italy?

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Luís » 2019-02-21, 15:15

OldBoring wrote:Where in Italy?


La Toscana
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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby n8an » 2019-02-22, 7:01

Luís wrote:I can understand a lot of it, yeah. But my level of Hebrew is not that high anyway. Sometimes I can understand whole sentences easily, sometimes I don't understand anything for several minutes... :P



The struggle is real :mrgreen:

It's quite impressive that you can understand stuff on that show, because it's a good mix of super colloquial Hebrew with some more formal and military stuff. I struggle to understand some of the military terms since I didn't grow up ever knowing that stuff.

Keep it up :D

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Re: Wanderlust support group 5

Postby Lur » 2019-03-04, 10:18

I wonder wether Finnish stuff I like is really Karelian and wether I should study Karelian instead.

(Problem: it's inside Russia and they don't have any large city. So I'm fucked)

More research is needed
Geurea dena lapurtzen uzteagatik, geure izaerari uko egiteagatik.


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