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Tarvos - TAC 2015 Pushkin/Scan | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5158 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 649 of 1511 20 April 2013 at 9:29pm | IP Logged |
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tarvos, I thought you had revised your Romanian plans after you knew you wouldn't go to
Romania. What are you goals now? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 650 of 1511 20 April 2013 at 10:36pm | IP Logged |
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The ones I stated in the update for this month (aka to reach 35 passive wave). But
honestly I would just like to reach a conversational level of fluency in Romanian, on par with, say, my German or my Russian. Good enough for travel purposes. But that's my goal in any language that's not French or Russian really. Edited by tarvos on 20 April 2013 at 10:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Emme Triglot Senior Member Italy Joined 5339 days ago 980 posts - 1594 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German Studies: Russian, Swedish, French | Message 651 of 1511 22 April 2013 at 9:38am | IP Logged |
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Привет, tarvos!
Congratulations on getting your fourth trophy. Now you’re in the very selective club of the most-appreciated contributors of this forum. Keep up writing interesting posts, Emme 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 652 of 1511 22 April 2013 at 1:56pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks, Emme!
Today I just had an interesting experience; I apparently understand Romanian. This is weird because I haven't really tried out my Romanian socially even once, and my level is not even half of Assimil covered. But I went to a language meeting for Dutch learners, and somehow I ended up speaking a bit of Romanian to a nice girl. She said her Dutch was worse than my Romanian ('s if), but I'll attribute that to the illusion of having worked on my accent and being able to fluently use four tenses, none of which go further back than the present perfect. But I managed to converse without much trouble and although I don't remember her literal words I can follow what she says and respond. This is a similar situation to how I learned Swedish. Please remember, kids; speech is a good way to practice your language. Remember; I am not a hero. I have not worked through endless course materials, I still make obvious mistakes (mult for foarte, f.ex.) and I can not conjugate verbs in any past tense to save my life! I IMPROVISE and work from there. Like every language learner before me, I have to go through the painful stage of "what is that" "why does she say it like THAT" and "what the hell is that last thing?" I just do my best and do what I can, and even with a limited vocabulary of a couple hundred words, a few basic tenses at your disposal, and some good old fashioned borrowing of loanwords, you can do a whole lot. Not everything. Not fluency. But a whole lot, and that's better than zero. And I like it when my levels beat zero. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 653 of 1511 23 April 2013 at 10:39pm | IP Logged |
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Etymological Notes About Nightmares
I found out something bizarre today; while discussing Romanian with Fabricio on Skype today, he asked about the origins of a lucra and a munci (two words both having the meaning to "work"), which do not resemble their other Romance counterparts in any way. A munci has a Slavic root, but a lucra does come from Latin (but it's a corruption of "to gain"). He then asked why Latin and French/Spanish/Portuguese etc. don't always have the same word as Latin, and that is of course for reasons familiar to everybody who's ever dealt with Latin - Vulgar Latin used different vocabulary from Latin (compare equus vs caballus - "cheval" in French). Fabricio then remarked that the Portuguese word cavalo is only used to refer to a mare (a female horse). (Egua is apparently a stallion). This reminded me of something else, namely the English word "nightmare". Composed of the words night and mare "evil spirit", we all know what a nightmare is. But mare also means female horse, as mentioned before. This is actually the word that survived in Dutch: we call it a "nachtmerrie", which is the butt of a timelessly awful joke about day-stallion (daghengst - and yes that is cognate with the Icelandic hestur (sp.?). The word merrie is of course also used for female horses. The meaning mare meaning "evil spirit" is not used anymore as such, it might be either dialectal or obsolete. In other words, the word became so corrupted that to us nightmare actually sounds like a night-horse, which admittedly is not a fun dream to have, particularly the black ones with Nazgûl that I've come across before, but in general has nothing to do with evil spirits of course. Ironically, it was also mentioned in this conversation that there exists a mula sem cabeça (a mare without a head), which is a female beheaded horse with flames in place of her head that comes to haunt people at night. So the words for female horses and evil spirits are intimately entwined (old Irish has "Morrigan" for evil female spirits). The wiktionary story went even further; French has retained the -mar root in their word for nightmare "cauchemar", which was borrowed into several other languages such as Russian and Romanian. Thus extends the force of the evil female beheaded horse-spirit that haunts our every dream at night. Edited by tarvos on 23 April 2013 at 10:41pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| agantik Triglot Senior Member France Joined 4627 days ago 217 posts - 335 votes Speaks: French*, English, Italian Studies: German, Norwegian | Message 654 of 1511 24 April 2013 at 10:02am | IP Logged |
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Along the same line, you should check The Nightmare by the Anglo Swiss artist Henry Fuseli. This painting
draws its Gothic inspiration from the double meaning of night/mare. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 655 of 1511 24 April 2013 at 1:44pm | IP Logged |
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Goals for May, and April Evaluation
Because I was early with fulfilling my April goals, I will already evaluate them, and set new goals for the end of May. May I also note here that Le Malgache has come in and I am now the proud owner of a Malagasy textbook, which may or may not be used soon depending on desire and time constraints and all that Good Stuff. Let's start with the best language first. French Read a single novel and passed the test with a very high grade. No further goals for May. I might just end up buying a random novel and reading it, or watch some youtube clips, but I have no particular goals. For now. German I am planning to buy a novel of some sort and read some German soon. Whether I will finish it directly is debatable, but one of my goals is to complete a German novel soon. Goal: Read one novel in German. Swedish: Nothing done, no goals for May. Maintenance, probably. Russian Since this is a language that gets used daily I don't need to do overly much to improve it, but it's time I start organising my visa and travel plans for Russia in the summer. So my goal here is to somehow prepare the trip, and maybe talk to some Couchsurfers. I also plan to continue taking Russian classes. Goal: Organise a visa in May (or start the process). Buy an easy reader and complete it. Romanian It's been going very well and today I completed lessons 36 and 37 already. Goals: Reach until lesson 56 of the passive wave (7 of the active wave). Breton I've been chugging onwards slowly. I have almost finished the book now, I did lesson 84 just yesterday. Goals: Finish the entire Assimil. Hebrew: This is going slowly, but there is some improvement here, especially in terms of verbs. Goals: Complete unit 4 of the Routledge course, and get to lesson 4 of L'Hebreu sans peine (after I finish Breton). Other goals I did nothing with Serbo-Croatian, that failed, but it doesn't matter, I didn't have much time (and did some practicing of Icelandic pronunciation). If I have time, a bonus goal is to complete Unit 1 of Colloquial Icelandic. But if I dabble in Malagasy or Serbo-Croatian or Swahili, all is fine. Some distraction will happen. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4699 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 656 of 1511 26 April 2013 at 7:27pm | IP Logged |
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Current business proscribes a minor update, so here goes:
Brezhoneg En em zibabet am eus mat-mat gant ar brezhoneg. Ur gwall studier on! Evit echuiñ e poent, ha ne vezañ ket bepred war lerc'h, desket am eus ar kentelioù betek an hini dekvet ha pevar-ugent. N'out ket pa 'vo echuet gant ar levr Assimil holl, met, emichañs, e viz Mae e vo benn studioù. Spontus-spontus a skrivan, met dalc'hin a ran da grog! Emichañs, plijadur a vo din lenn levrioù ha keleier ar vro e brezhoneg! Prest eo! Русский На прошлой неделе урока не был, так что просто поболтал с друзьми. Еще купил я книгу <<Судьба человека>>, рассказ Михалиа Шолохова. Ну, не знаю, если у меня время хватит, чтобы ее прочитать в следующем месяце, но, через месяца два наверное закончу. Limba Româna Și am învățat limba româna până lecția treizeci și opta. Și am văzut lecția patruzeci - acolo e scris "mon tailleur est riche"... unde asta am văzut???? עברית לא עשיתי הרבה. למדתי השיעור ארבעים ושבע. Français J'ai également achété un livre en français... Deutsch ... und ausserdem habe ich auch ein Deutsches Buch gekauft, nämlich "Spieltrieb" von Juli Zeh. Die nächsten Wochen möchte ich gerne ein wenig mein Deutsch üben und ich hoffe dass etwas Gutes zum Lesen mir dabei hilft. Edited by tarvos on 26 April 2013 at 9:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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