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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3321 of 3959 11 July 2013 at 10:20pm | IP Logged |
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I have a lot of studying to do after this (having spent almost two full evenings on the homepage of my travel club), so let me just mention that I have studied two languages this evening. I did a thorough study of ten lines from an article about стратегия кодирования глагольных актантов from the Russian Wikipedia, but then I became so interested in the subject that I just read through the rest of the article. It is fairly wellknown that the parts of a sentence are dictated by the characteristics of the verb if there is one (goodbye "NP VP"), and in one flavour of grmmar these elements are called actants, while the number of main elements is called its valence (3,2 or 1). The article also briefly touched upon the notion of ergativity.
For Irish I first did a full page of mixed retranslation and copy from Harry Potter, then a wordlist with around 40 words - but I have at least 100 more waiting on my sheets. Earlier today I read some of the texts in the UEA yearbook, i.e. the booklet with all the administrative and organizational information about the world of Esperanto you might wish for - and maybe slightly more than that. But not much readable stuff. And now I'll do some studying. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3322 of 3959 17 July 2013 at 8:41am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I went through a paagraph of Polish for the first time in a long time, using an age old trilingual printout with interspersed Polish and Russian and a Danish translation in a separate column. At the time I decided to drop because I felt the time was needed for my Russian, where I still had to look words up all the time when faced with Russian texts. However my wordlist stravaganza earlier this your of the whole Russian alphabet plus some time with retranslation exercises has helped my Russian reading skills so far ahead that I am thinking about taking up another Slavic language. And here the logical choice is Polish, because I already have had a bout of studying with this language. Before doing copying-with-hyperliteral-translation from the aforementioned text (something about visiting zoos) I tried to have a look at a textbook, "Mówimy po polsku" from 1979, but I only got to "Dobry dzień pani" at page 27 before I stopped the experiment - that's not how I want to learn languages. However I may use it as extensive reading because it has parallel Polish and English text plus some grammar and a fair amount of phonology at the start. I don't have the audio (which presumably came on tapes), but that doesn't matter because I tend to become nauseated if I try to listen to such things - the slow, pedagogical and ultra boring kind of audio is simply not my cup of tea. Well, strictly speaking tea isn't my cup of tea, but that's just an extralinguistic observation. So I intend to go back to my thin, but adequate Pons grammar (in German) for systematic grammatical information.
OK, time will tell how much time I can find for Polish. Apart from that I did a mexture of copying (with implied translation) and retranslation right off the text with limited use of a dictionary on two wellknown guide books: my Russian guide to The Ducal Palace in Venice and my Romanian guide to Schönbrunn. I have of course done quite a lot of things in different languages since the last entry in this log, but mostly of the usual kind: wordlists, copying, retranslation and a fair amount of extensive reading and listening on the web - which includes the interview from day one of the Budapest meeting with Emanuele Marini. I have seen another interview from the same event wearlier, but it was slightly chaotic. The format for this one was much better: a row of fine polyglots in their own right speak to Emanuele one at a time in one (or two) of their common languages. This means that you can get some real finished phrases instead of the impression of a poor man being attacked from all sides at once. The one situation where the video got somewhat confused was midway through it where one of his interlocutors tried Icelandic and Slovenian, veering off into something sounding slightly like Swedish when Emanuele declined to try speaking in those languages. Just one short remark more: in the ROmanian guide to Schönbrunn I noticed that the text uses the 'official' treatment of the 'a' thing (the possessive socalled 'particle). I once did a thorough investigation of this syntactical element based on internet texts, and contrary to expectation it was inflected according to the owner, not the owned thing, which runs squarely against the rules stipulated in the grammars I have consulted. But in this guidebook you get the classical treatment - that is, it uses concordance with the owned element. Here in a sentence where the form used first is "al" in the masculin (as apartament), and after that a feminine form "a" after "parte": Camera de toaletă nu avea să lipsească din niciun apartament al Elisabetei, pentru că ingrijirea frumuseţii, precum şi sportul pentru menţinerea silueta erau parte a programului ei zilnic. The text is also 'oldfashioned' in another way, namely through the extensive use of verbs in the simple past, but I suppose this is normal in literature - the problem is of course that I hardly ever read Romanian literature. And on top of that there is of course the situation where half the sources on the internet have dropped all diacritics, but 'serious' sources like Wikipedia and practically all printed texts retain them. RO: În afară de asta, eu gândesc că celebra împărăteasă Sissi a fost o femeie destul de insuportabilă! Se spune în ghid care a petrecut mai multe ore pe zi pentru îngrijirea părului său (de un metru lungime), și a călătorit în jurul lumii în loc de a face munca sa la curte. Ea a ales chiar o prietenă specială pentru a distra pe împărat, ca să nu cadă în tentația de a alege pentru lui înșuși o amigă. Împărat, cu toate acestea, a fost un om nepretențios și harnic sau cu alte cuvinte, de moarte plictisitor - doar faptul că a dormit ca împărat într-un pat simplu de fier toată viața lui spune multe. Cei doi oameni pur și simplu nu nu mai ar fi fost căsătoriți unul cu alta. Edited by Iversen on 17 July 2013 at 9:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4707 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 3323 of 3959 17 July 2013 at 10:15am | IP Logged |
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RO: Util de știut că articolul genitival nu e folosit prin posedat în realitate, dar prin
posesor. N-am întâlnit niciodată fenomen ăsta, dar o să fie momente în viață unde voi întâlni folosirea alternativă. Caragiale - un prin autori cei mai cunoscuți - folosește din când în când trecut simplu. E mai comun în literatură că în viață, dar mă gândesc că în niște judeci la țară (în Oltenia, dacă nu mă greșesc) trecut simplu înlocuiește perfect compus, prin învățătoarea mea și cartea mea de text. Edited by tarvos on 17 July 2013 at 10:15am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3324 of 3959 18 July 2013 at 1:20pm | IP Logged |
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RO: Am găsit "raportul" meu original de cercetare despre elementul misterios "a", pe care se-l poate vedea descris atât ca particulă ca și ca articol sau pronume posesiu. În general avem modelul:
element deținut <- element 'a' proprietar -- element proprietar în genitiv sau precedut de possessiv De pildă cu genitiv: Primii locuitori ai satului au fost românii de viata nemeseasca din Ardeal, Cu posesiv: Marea teoremă a lui Fermat Personal, eu sunt cel mai înclinat pentru a vedea acest cuvânt ca un pronume pe care s-a atașat un element substanțial (proprietar) în genitiv sau cu posesiv. Problemul nostru este că nu-l putem apela "posesiv" pentru că acest nume deja e ocupat de către cuvintul declinat "meu", care este adjectival (un meu cuvint, cuvint meu..) First thanks to Tarvos for taking my qualms about the 'a thing' seriously. Let's illustrate what the problems are. In English we can express concrete as well as abstract ownership with a genitive: "the king's servants" or with a prepositional construction: "the servants of the king". Instead of menitioning the king himself you can use a socalled possessive pronoun "his", which strictly speaking as a pro-adjective: "his servants". The prepositional construction exists, though it sounds slightly out-of-place in the example, maybe because of the plural so let's try the singular: "a servant of his" (it is symptomatic that genitival or at least stressed variants are used in the 2. And 1. Person: "an acquaintance of mine/of yours"). In Romanian the first construction is common, but with the opposite wordorder: "slujitorii regului" (literally "servantsThe kingThe's". It is also worth noticing that with pro-adjectival demonstrative or an adjective in front of the noun this element will take on the posticlitic article – also if it is in the genitival form: "avantajele acestui sistem" (i.e. 'advantagesThe this's system', where "acestui" accords with "sistem", not with the advantages). But Romanian has a third possibility, namely the use of an element which so to say an function as a reference to the owned thing and mostly also concords with this thing, and then a genitival/possessival noun phrase can attach itself to this element: " Marea teoremă a lui Fermat" (literally: bigThe theorem a-thing him's Fermat ). However sometimes you see that the a-thing instead concords with the following noun phrase. Besides the a-thing can occur as part of a subject or in a prepositional phrase, i.e. detached from the owned thing: "un prieten de-al meu" (a friend of-athing mine"), and in this case it looks slightly more like an article (Eminescu: "De ce în al meu suflet/ de ani eu moartea port"). One important thing to notice is that it has got nothing whatsoever to do with the preposition 'a'. Possession can be expressed with the preposition "de", but contrary to the other Romance languages (which don't have a genitival case for their nouns) this isn't the normal way of doing things. I can see that my first collection of examples from 2011 covers some, but not all of these situations, and sometimes the form actually doesn't show in which direction the concordance goes. Therefore I'm thinking about making a new collection with unequivocal examples. Until then Any decent Romanian grammar on paper or in digital form will of course have more stuff about the a-thing, for instance in sections 3.1.3.4.1.1., 3.2.3., 3.4.5.2. and 3.4.7.4.3. of this online grammar, where the thing is designated as an article.. EDIT: I have now been looking at some new examples from the internet, and it has struck me that there is one group of examples which is both numerous and also has some special characteristics, namely those that use a a-word and a possive pronoun without a substantiv to refer to your beloved ones - or i the case of children: their parents. For instance I found a discussion among Romanian teenagers about the reactions of their parents, and they abound in examples like the following ones: Tu cum le-ai spus alor tai că fumezi? (thou how them-haveyou said toPOSSthem parents that thou smoke?) Iar de fata cu ai mei nu am fumat niciodata. (However in faceThe with ofPOSSthem mine not have-I smoken never-ever) But also with a preceding substantive: Pai ai mei stiu si nu stiu ca fumez. (Parents ofPOSSthem mine know or not know that I-smoke) Edited by Iversen on 19 July 2013 at 1:29am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3325 of 3959 19 July 2013 at 1:26am | IP Logged |
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I have just taken an English vocabulary test and read the summaries from 2010 to now - quite interesting stuff, but I'm slightly disappointed that native English speakers of my age don't score higher than me. The problem with such tests is that they estimate your vocabulary on the basis of supposed difficult words, mostly from the academical world. But given that I don't live in an Anglophone country my weaknesses would be in the names of common household items, popular culture and administrative or commercial entities - though these would probably also be specific for each Anglophone country.
IR: Léigh mé tuilleadh leathanach as an radharc ina bhailigh Hagrid suas Harry Potter agus fhaigheann sé conas is beag a fhios aige mar gheall ar an domhan draíochta. PO: Myślałem, że całkowicie zapomniał o języku polskim, ale sytuacja nie jest tak zdesperowany, jak myślałem. Czytam i przetłumaczyłem 4-5 zdań z regulaminami wrocławskim zoo, która znalazłem w internecie. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3326 of 3959 22 July 2013 at 1:13pm | IP Logged |
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I have been away for three days on a mini holiday here in Denmark. One of the placces I visited was the renaissance manor house Rosenholm here in Jutland, and I mention this because of one piece of information given by the guide. One of the owners was called "lærde Holger" Rosenkrantz ('savvy Holger'), who lived 1574-1642, and the information waqs that he 'spoke 11 languages'. I have tried to find confirmation and maybe a language list on the internet, but no - it is mentioned in several places that he knew Latin, Ancient Greek and Hebraic, and you can add to that Danish, High German (he studied in Wittenberg), Low German (the most important foreign language in Denmark) and almost certainly also French and Dutch. English? Well, maybe, and Swedish would have been quite important because Sweden and Denmark were sworn enemies around this time. But only the three dead languages are named on the internet, and only beause he most of all was interested in theology - where he was as much of a free thinker as you could be around 1600 without being accused of heresy.
While searching for materials about Holger I found some information about other well-learned personalities from the time, including several noblewomen. The most learned of these was apparently Birgitte Thott (p.243), 1610-1662, who sent for teachers in Latin, Ancient Greek and Hebraic as soon as her husband had died, but even before that she had learned several contemporary languages - for instance she translated one of Holger's books from German to Danish during this period. Apart from that I have visited eight zoos and aquaria, one archeological site and eight museums within a fortnight, so it has been a busy time. During the last weekend I had brought along a beginner's textbook in Polish from 1979. It is in many ways quite good - for instance all the texts are given in parallel in Polish and English, and the grammatical tables are reasonably adequate - apart from the late introduction of the concepts perfective and imperfective and the curious absence of the words from the example texts in the vocabulary at the end of the book. I'll try to get through this book within a week or so, and then it's back to genuine texts. Edited by Iversen on 22 July 2013 at 1:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3327 of 3959 24 July 2013 at 2:22pm | IP Logged |
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POR: Apenas li um artigo em Português sobre os superpoliglotas, e como seria de esperar de um artigo na lingua Portuguêsa sobre um tal tema, o exemplo exemplar foi Carlos Freire, que ainda na idade de 80 anos aprende 2-3 idiomas por ano e conhece agora 135 línguas de japonês a esperanto. Mais ..
Aprender dezenas de línguas não é o mesmo que ser fluente em várias ao mesmo tempo. O americano Gregg Cox, citado no Guinness Book como "o maior linguista vivo" (64 línguas e 11 dialetos) conseguia se comunicar em apenas 7 idiomas ao mesmo tempo. Freire encarou um desafio maior em Moscou. Durante uma reunião com estrangeiros, teve de falar em 10 idiomas diferentes. E conseguiu. Michael Erard realizou uma pesquisa com 172 hiperpoliglotas e constatou que a maioria pode manter de 5 a 9 línguas ativas na memória. As outras ficam guardadas em outra área, a memória de longo prazo, como se fossem arquivos comprimidos no computador. O conhecimento está lá, mas não pode ser acionado instantaneamente. Leva um tempo para reabri-los. Freire, por exemplo, explica que, para relembrar um idioma, ele precisa de uma semana de estudo. O que se escquece nesta discussão es precisar a diferencia entre os empregos ativos o não ativos dos seus idiomas, e além disso fica enganoso ignorar a possibilidade de falar com errores e lacunas. Não exista um limite absoluta de 7 o 9 idiomas, mas sim uma situação onde uma lingua seja tão má qu não se quer usa-la. Eu não problemas a leer o ainda ouvir (e compreender) por exemplo o Platt, que eu quase nunca usa - na verdade, eu escuchei uma gravação com Ina Müller ontem e entendia tudo. Seria muito mais difícil de repente ter que falar Platt. AF: btw, ek het ook hoor 'n paar lang podgoois in Afrikaans gister. Ek het bespreek 'n ekspedisie na Suid-Afrika later vanjaar, en selfs als ek hou minder en minder van die konsep van dit toer het ek nog hoop dat ek een kans te kry om te probeer sommige Afrikaans te praat. Of ten minste luister na wat Afrikaans, as ek kan wegkom van die engels-babbelnde groep. Eintlik kan ek nie verstaan nie hoe ek kan zo DOM genoeg om 'n toer in 'n truck weer te bestel! Laaste keer in 2001 was dit 'n ramp, want die gidse gespeel musiek al die tyd op die paaie. Ek het daardie toer in Bloemfontein afgebreek en belowe myself nooit weer zo'n toer te bespreek. En nou lyk dit of ek is gelok in die bespreking met 'n maatskappy van dieselfde kwaade soort. Hoe kon dit gebeur? Yesterday I read Polish grammar in the bis back home from work, and I listened to podcasts from Radio Sonder Grense (4 of around 20 minutes each from the series "Die Tale wat ons praat" (= the language we speak)). I have booked a trip to South Africa later this year where I may be able to get a few moments of listening and maybe even trying to speak Afrikans. But I already regret having booked this specific tour because the more I have seen about their plans and habits the more they look like the disgusting Drifters, with whom I survived the first half of a noise polluted truck tour in 2001 - every time we were outside the national parks the guides played loud music in their infamous truck. Add to that breakfasts based on English toast bread in the roadside .. and as little contact with civilisation as possible. I left the tour midway when we arrived at Bloemfontein, which is a pleasant town with good hotels, lots of sights and good transport - the rest continued their experience after a night in a freeeezing cold hostel with an atmosphere like a churchyard, and I never heard from them again. And now it seems that I have been dumb enough to book a similar tour with a likeminded competitor - though I only got the most ominous informations after I had accepted, like roadside meals, a 'truck' and tents for some participants (though I have paid for single accomodation). Things like that remind me of the evil old days with Drifters. And if I then even can't get some Afrikaans experiences because of a perpetually English babbling tourgroup then the whole thing seems like an invitation to a tour through hell. But let's leave these dire premonitions. Maybe things will go much better than I expect, and I'll only be eaten by the lions. In the evening yesterday I copied a page or so from Harry Potter in Irish and a passage from the Romanian guide to Schönbrunn, and I went through a couple of lessons in my antique Polish course book, and I did retranslation of almost the whole article about Volga Finns from the Russian Wikipedia. These people weren't Finns at all, but they spoke languages within the Finno-Ugrian language group (which b.t.w. is called something like the 'Finno-Ugorskij' language group in Russian - please notice how the 'r' is differently placed), and they still live in the area just to the West of the Ural mountains - but their languages are under pressure from Russian. Edited by Iversen on 24 July 2013 at 2:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3328 of 3959 25 July 2013 at 10:51am | IP Logged |
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POL: Wczoraj czytałem jedną lekcję z mojego antyczne polskiego podręcznika (od 1979), i dostrzegałem pewne urocze stare rzeczy.
P. 73 niektórzy studenci miełi radio i grająłi muzykę jazzową na nim na plaży. Jazz? Czy to jeszcze istnieje? Słowo to używane do 'portable radio set' było "radio turystyczne" (powiedzieliśmy 'transistor(radio)' w języku duńskim). A w następnym lekcji główne caracters muszą posiadać karty pływacy żeby wynająć kajak. Moja prędkość upadł na ziemię, i wątpię, że skończę książkę w tym tygodniu. Ale język polski wciąż wydaje się o wiele łatwiejsze niż za pierwszym razem gdy starałem się go uczyć. I jak można widać, mogę budować zdania, które wyglądają jak polski (I hope). Last evening I continued my perousal of the quaint old Polish textbook "Mówimy po polsku" from 1979. The texts contain words which certainly have been stonedead for many years in English and presumably also in Polish, but that's can't be more harmful than reading classical authors, and some language learners actually seem to do that. Sometimes the cultural hints (which generally are kept to a minimum) also show the age of the book, like when two couples who hire a canoe have to deposit their swimming certificates (!) at the 'boathouse'. And the main titles in a newspaper comprise items like "Szkolą się nasi kosmonauci" (translated as 'Our cosmonauts are in training' in the book). Did Poland ever get a school for cosmonauts? Apart from that I did some Russian and Irish studies, and lo and behold, I exchanged a few words in Romanian with the cleaning lady at my job yesterday. Edited by Iversen on 25 July 2013 at 11:08am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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