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Making our own Assimil

  Tags: Assimil
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
130 messages over 17 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 16 17 Next >>
farrioth
Senior Member
New Zealand
Joined 6088 days ago
171 posts - 173 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Russian, Esperanto, Sanskrit, Japanese

 
 Message 121 of 130
10 November 2008 at 4:27pm | IP Logged 
J-Learner wrote:
I think perhaps that a space needs to be devoted towards it and not all the problems talked about in one space.


If a discussion is about a particular dialogue, then the wiki talk pages would be a good place for this. For other issues (eg. naming the characters) a new page could be made on the wiki.

Sennin wrote:
I suggest that we add some sort of version tags to the dialogs that are increased with every change. This way it will be clear if the translations are up to date with the last edition of the dialog.


The Wiki page history probably comes in handy here; one can match up edit dates. However if a translation is modified after a change to the original, then we don't know if this change is taken into account in the edit or not. So, versioning could be a good idea. Is there perhaps a wiki addon that does this?

Edit: Missed a closing QUOTE tag.

Edited by farrioth on 10 November 2008 at 10:37pm
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Cainntear
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Scotland
linguafrankly.blogsp
Joined 6009 days ago
4399 posts - 7687 votes 
Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic
Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh

 
 Message 122 of 130
10 November 2008 at 4:56pm | IP Logged 
Volte wrote:
Cainntear wrote:
Of course, if Sprachprofi isn't willing to accept the word of all the native speakers that "I'm well" is incorrect English, then the project won't go very far.


I'll take the blame for that one; I defended "I'm well", and I'm a native speaker. The simple fact of the matter is that conventional responses to "How are you?" vary in English; I'd hesitate to call any of them incorrect, and "I'm well" doesn't seem all that utterly rare to me.


I've had a quick check in the British National Corpus. The phrase "I 'm well" occurs 72 times in total.

29 of these were from speech corpora.

Of these 29, 28 were not in the pattern we are looking at: some were hesitation ("I'm ... Well ...") and some were using well as an adverb describing an adjective ("I'm well pleased" "I'm well aware that" etc).

The only speech example using "I'm well" is as follows:
"I asked him first, How are you? I 'm well . Er medically, as best as I understand what the doctors tell me"

So "well" is used here as an antonym for "sick", as several of us asserted on the other thread.

The written corpora aren't really applicable here, but I've scanned my eye over the concordance and there are plenty of instances of "I'm well" meaning "not sick".

There is one instance that cannot be easily identified as one thing or the other.

BNC wrote:
"Barney darling," she whispered in a soft mid Atlantic accent, "how lovely to see you again. How are you?" She stood back, still holding his hands and saw tears appear in the eyes of the old man who had been more of a Father to her than her own Father.

"I 'm well , Miss Julie, all the better for having seen you. I would never have recognised you," he spluttered, "America must have agreed with you."

"Oh, it was wonderful Barney. It would take a million years to tell you all the things I have done, and some of the things I wouldn't tell even you," she said mischievously, "but it's great to be home. How's Father and Mother? I must admit I am surprised"


So the only occurence of this phrase in the British National Corpus is in a period novel written in a purposefully anachronistic style.

Meanwhile, by match number 25 (of 210) for "I 'm fine", I've already come across 4 as a response to "How are you" or similar.

Sprachprofi wrote:
I did not go with "I'm good" because somebody on this thread said that "I'm good" offends her ears, or something to that effect. It doesn't sound good to me either.

It offends their ears because it's an Americanism (and doesn't appear in the BNC for that reason -- the BNC is taken from UK sources), but I've got past that and I now realise that my old loathing of Americanisms was a distraction -- in my head, Americanisms were more wrong than bad English. This wasn't fair on my students, so I got that out of my head.

(For my corpus searches I used the BNC 1980-1993 as on the Brigham-Young University website. The interface is exceptionally easy and powerful. http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/)

Edited by Cainntear on 10 November 2008 at 4:57pm
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roncy
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5915 days ago
105 posts - 112 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, German, Spanish, Latin

 
 Message 124 of 130
11 November 2008 at 7:02am | IP Logged 
Great Books wrote:
The idea of writing a language course by a non-native speaker is quite amusing. I don't really know why it reminds me of a dialogue I once read: ...

You're being silly again, sio. Stick to what you do best, give useful links and advice, but refrain from pesky, irrelevant asides.
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Leopejo
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 6107 days ago
675 posts - 724 votes 
Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English
Studies: French, Russian

 
 Message 125 of 130
11 November 2008 at 7:11am | IP Logged 
roncy wrote:
You're being silly again, sio. Stick to what you do best, give useful links and advice, but refrain from pesky, irrelevant asides.

Who is sio?

That was a funny dialogue and I enjoyed it - not that I understood its relevance. Great Books wasn't spamming or anything and for sure has been very useful in this forum many times. Did anybody get offense at that dialogue?

There are worse things in life than some "pesky, irrelevant asides" - like a suddenly unavailable scanner.
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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6437 days ago
4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 126 of 130
11 November 2008 at 8:36am | IP Logged 
Great Books wrote:
The idea of writing a language course by a non-native speaker is quite amusing.


In all honesty, I don't agree. Both native and non-native speakers can (and usually do) make an utter mess of attempted language courses. Both have done some reasonable work.

I think Sprachprofi's English is at least as good as my own, and quite possibly better. In other words, while she's not technically a native English speaker, I consider her to be at least as competent in - and have as good a feel for - the language as most intelligent, educated native speakers I've met.

It's quite amusing how concepts that can seem amusing in the abstract can turn out not to be, in the concrete.

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Leopejo
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Italy
Joined 6107 days ago
675 posts - 724 votes 
Speaks: Italian*, Finnish*, English
Studies: French, Russian

 
 Message 127 of 130
11 November 2008 at 9:17am | IP Logged 
Volte wrote:
Great Books wrote:
The idea of writing a language course by a non-native speaker is quite amusing.


In all honesty, I don't agree. Both native and non-native speakers can (and usually do) make an utter mess of attempted language courses. Both have done some reasonable work.

I think Sprachprofi's English is at least as good as my own, and quite possibly better. In other words, while she's not technically a native English speaker, I consider her to be at least as competent in - and have as good a feel for - the language as most intelligent, educated native speakers I've met.

It's quite amusing how concepts that can seem amusing in the abstract can turn out not to be, in the concrete.

I agree with Volte.

On a side note, of a language pair that shall remain nameless, the best textbooks and the best courses have been/are by teachers of the same native language as the students, not target language natives. This in my, completely biased, experience.

Edited by Leopejo on 11 November 2008 at 9:18am
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Sennin
Senior Member
Bulgaria
Joined 6032 days ago
1457 posts - 1759 votes 
5 sounds

 
 Message 128 of 130
11 November 2008 at 9:24am | IP Logged 
Great Books wrote:
The idea of writing a language course by a non-native speaker is quite amusing.

The lessons are translated anyway, so I don't see how this is relevant.


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