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La troisième croisade (FR/IT/EO) TAC ’15 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5159 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 41 of 92 12 November 2014 at 6:41pm | IP Logged |
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What a nice set of materials you got! All thos bilingual editions show it is possible to keep learning Nahuatl in Mexico once you've been past the main textbooks, and this is quite encouraging for a learner of a rare language.
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| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4327 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 42 of 92 13 November 2014 at 2:21am | IP Logged |
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I thought exactly the same thing. After visiting several booths, I was like "semi-extinct language, my boot". (Just kidding. I know a lot more has to be done to fish Nahuatl out of the danger zone...)
The greatest part is that the editorials and book houses invited to this particular event brought mostly youth-oriented material, but when I'd ask the people in charge about material in Nahuatl they'd tell me "oh, we do have more books in Nahuatl, we just didn't bring them because of lack of space. Check out the catalogues at our websites" and stuff like that. Now I know who sells the kind of material I want to get. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4327 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 43 of 92 21 November 2014 at 3:13am | IP Logged |
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Been trying to update for a couple days now, but for some reason I just didn't found the time.
First of all, a general update. - After finishing the Italki challenge, I'm afraid my weekly hours of speaking Italian have gone down drastically. I'm still reading and writing a bit more, as maintenance, but I want it to be December soon so I have more free time and squeeze in a few more Italian activities. - La surprise de ce mois! I started French. I already had a few grammar guides lying around (I don't really know why, cause French and I have always had a love-hate relationship) and I missed fooling around on Duolingo. The gauntlet was thrown by my mother, who thought it'd be amusing to see how well and how quickly I could learn the language after Italian, and (ever the willing guinea pig) I agreed. Besides, I've come to think it may be practical to know at least a bit of French... -According to my stats on the 6WC website, I've logged a little over 15 hours of Nahuatl study since the start of November. Not too bad, but it's the 20th already and I was aiming for an hour a day... And now, the main dish: I had an interesting breakthrough regarding verbs in Nahuatl, having learned three different conjugations in a week: past, future and reverential (!). PAST Regardless of it being perfect or imperfect, verbs in the past tense are always expressed by an "o-" prefix before the personal pronoun, in a pattern that looks like this: O- + (pers. pron.) + (verb) To make it perfect past, you add -c (for singular persons) or -que (for plurals), and to make it imperfect, you add -a/-ya (for singular) or -yah (for plurals). Using the verb TEQUITI (to work) as an example: I worked: onitequitic We worked: otitequitique I was working: onitequitia We were working: otitequitiah FUTURE The future tense is a good deal less confusing because it has no prefix: you just add the suffix -z (for singulars) or -zque (for plurals). I will work: nitequitiz We will work: titequitizque REVERENTIALS Reverentials are used when speaking to someone that is of great esteem to you, so it can be used either when you're in the presence of someone important, or with a dear friend. To me, they are more complex than past and future because (even though strictly speaking the reverential conjugation would be a formal version of the present tense) it requires using a reverential pronoun AFTER the personal pronoun, and minding whether you're using a transitive, intransitive or reflexive verb (because the suffix changes accordingly), like this: (pers. pron) + (rev. pron: MO) + (verb) + tia/ltia (for transitives), lia/ilia (for intransitives) or tzino/tzinoa (for reflexives) For example, "you work": timotequitilia "You bathe": timoaltitzinoa On a different note, I feel like I'm lagging a bit behind on vocabulary. I think I should start writing to fix this, but the thought of it being somewhat unsupervised makes me think it wouldn't be too productive... 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4327 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 44 of 92 30 November 2014 at 2:39am | IP Logged |
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Long post ahead.
NAHUATL So, I took a few days off to go to a town called Cuetzalan (state of Puebla, about six hours away from the capital). I've wanted to go to this place for about a year, not only because I needed a vacation but because it's one of the few towns left in Mexico where Nahuatl is actively spoken everyday. A lot of signs were bilingual, and many stores had names in Nahuatl, and I was very happy to be able to read AND understand them!. I sadly didn't get the chance to speak it, though. It does remain a native language and people are really proud of it, but I was a bit disheartened to notice that the only people I heard speaking it were farmers and countrypeople who'd come to town to sell their things, and then, only among themselves. On top of this, I learned a bit of local culture: when you're from outside the community, you're considered a "coyotl" (a coyote, or an outsider), whereas you're "macehual" ("of the people" or "common man") if you're a local. The positive side of this is that people don't expect you to speak Nahuatl well (which sort of takes the pressure off, I guess). I suppose that the "us and them" mentality can't be helped after the hundreds of years of abuse the Mexica have lived through. We were invited to a Honor the Flag ceremony at a local school, where all students are the children of local farmers and businesskeepers. These ceremonies happen in all schools in Mexico, in which children salute the flag every Monday and sign the national anthem. I was moved to hear my country's anthem completely in Nahuatl, and to hear the children relate major historical events ocurred on that day bilingually, in Nahuatl and Spanish. The English teacher (who invited us) told us that at their school, language education starts with a 100% Nahuatl curricula during pre-school, becoming a 70/30 balance of Nahuatl/Spanish during elementary school, and finally introducing English in middle school. Since English is obligatory from elementary school in my city and yet yields very little result, I was very interested by this, so I asked him how quickly they acquired English by that age and as third (not second) language, and was thrilled to hear that they absorbed it like sponges. All in all, I got some energy from this trip to finish my current Nahuatl textbook (Matitlatocan Nahuallatolli). However, I also made up my mind to allow it to rest for a good while (at least a few months) after I'm done with 6WC, so that when I come back to it I won't feel quite so worn. Which brings me to my second point... LANGUAGES IN GENERAL & PLANS FOR NEXT YEAR I'm feeling torn. I love Nahuatl and the prospect of learning Levantine Arabic, as I had planned, makes me excited like I haven't been in a while. However (and there's always a however)... I've realized these languages demand a ton from me, and require too much attention to do in pairs, as I usually do. I'm used to doing maintenance tasks for Japanese and Italian almost everyday, but it's getting hard to do so while I learn Nahuatl actively and fiddle around with French and Esperanto. On top of that, German keeps looking at me with seductive eyes (gasp!). I think I've found my limit to be four simultaneous languages, and no more than one active-study language. Having realized this, I'm thinking I need to rein my wanderlust in, and focus on studying only ONE language for at least two months, starting January 2015, as an exercise in concentration (though sadly, since I won't be doing the same language all year, I think this disqualifies me for TAC...). At this point, I'm thinking I want to give myself two months with French, see where I can take it, but I'm giving myself a few more weeks before deciding what language I want to kick the year off with. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5858 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 45 of 92 30 November 2014 at 5:39am | IP Logged |
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You might want to try something similar to emk's Spanish experiment except with French. With your Italian, English, and Spanish i think your comprehension of French would come by super quickly.
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| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4327 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 46 of 92 30 November 2014 at 7:34pm | IP Logged |
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I hadn't thought of using native material (at this point my strategy consists purely of italki tutoring), but that doesn't sound half bad for input-based work. I'll look a little more into it. Thanks!
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| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4327 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 47 of 92 31 December 2014 at 1:18am | IP Logged |
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(Second to) last day of the year, and I'm still around. Unbelievable!
I'm not sure if this means I officially finished TAC, but I'm pretty satisfied with the results. As a result of catching a traitorous end-of-year cold, putting my thoughts on paper in orderly fashion is turning out to be a bit harder than I thought, but I'll try anyway: 1. General review From reviewing my log, I can see that I decided quite late in the year to take Nahuatl up, and that I was anything but consistent. Mizton (my friend and tutor) was instrumental in getting the inertia necessary to get started, but after the first push, Nahuatl was a bit like a car with a really stiff gear change--going, but not necessarily at an easy pace, and more often than not stopping at odd places. Entering team Rare was, I believe, one of the reasons why I managed to stay motivated (in fluctuating levels, but motivated nonetheless) the whole of TAC '14. The fact that we had both a good leader and exemplary figures in the team contributed to keeping a semblance of discipline. However, in summer I had a huge hiccup, having tried to move to another country and failed, which interrupted me individually for some weeks. Picking up after that was tricky, but like it's happened before with other languages, what I had managed to learn before the interruption sunk in during that period, so I didn't really feel the need to recapitulate too much. Studying a "rare" language for the first time proved to be more of a challenge than I had suspected. Finding materials wasn't easy, but once I'd found the thread, I just kept unearthing more and more editorial houses and books in the language. It was a bit of a relief to notice Nahuatl isn't dead, that there IS a healthy interest in keeping the language alive. However, I also came across some ugly truths about why this language is so hard to come across in an urban context. I got the feeling that it is highly politicized, that people with veiled interests would rather it stays confined within small communities that dare not try to promote it to the outer world, and that doesn't speak it or try to teach it to people not of their own community. 2. Numbers and projects If you ask me now where I stand now in Nahuatl, I'd say I'm an uneasy A2. I've joined several Facebook groups in which it is spoken, and I can understand maybe 15-20% of what's written in them without peeking in the dictionary. I started from absolute zero, so this isn't too bad. I decided to make Team Rare's last challenge (a video presentation) sort of a final exam-type project, writing the script and then translating it to Nahuatl myself (Mizton gave it a once-over before I recorded it, though). You can see it here. The script was actually somewhat longer than what's featured in the video, but I noticed that unlike what you hear in the video (which only needed some corrections) Mizton pretty much had to rewrite the section I cut out. The reason why I cut it out was that I realized I had aimed too high and did not want to feature something I hadn't written myself. Around November, I took a trip to Cuetzalan del Progreso, one of Mexico's towns, where this language is spoken everyday, in the hopes of at least speaking one word or two. I didn't get to, but I did get to hear it and see it written everywhere, so I wouldn't call it a completely failed mission. It was during this trip, however, that I started realizing the complicated politics and harsh realities behind Nahuatl, and came to the conclusions you'll read in a moment. In a nutshell In the end, making Nahuatl my main learning language for this year was an enrichening, and at the same time, hugely frustrating experience. I met people with similar concerns to mine, who are studying it for the same reason, and had my eyes opened to a whole new type of poetry that requires a flexibility of mind I aspire to have. This was awesome and marked my year in a special way. However, realizing that I could continue to study it for years on end without the possibility of ever getting to speak it was an incredibly frustrating realization (since every language I've ever learned has been with the goal of communicating, not for academic purposes). It's made me reevaluate how much energy I want to put into it next year. One clue: not much. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5159 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 48 of 92 31 December 2014 at 5:07pm | IP Logged |
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Thank you for your detailed report, Lakeseayesno, it was really interesting! You really
have a point about what you mentioned regarding this whole process of learning a rare language and trying to get to use it. Pity that you won't follow us into anothr year, but I'll be following your progress for Italian and French. And maybe someday you'll find yourself in the mood to learn a (maybe not so) rare language again. Good luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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