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TAC My poor overwhelmed brain

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mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 169 of 223
01 October 2009 at 9:22pm | IP Logged 
mick33 wrote:
Esp: ¡Estoy frustrado! Acabo de estudiar español y no recuerdo los verbos irregulares o las ortografías de los palabras, ¡Qué dificíl!. Quiero traducir dos canciones ahora pero no tengo mi diccionario bilingüe. Escuché la música por la mañana pero no entendí nada nunca. ¡Ay de mi! No aprendo más español ahora. Traduciré este mensaje mañana, ojalá que seré menos frustrado.

Hasta la vista
Mick
   
I think I was wrong! I did remember more Spanish yesterday than I thought, but I messed up and forgot to type "traduzca" in the last sentence, which I think should read "Mañana traduzca este mensaje, ojalá que ser menos frustrado." I'll just summarize yesterday's post. I was frustrated because I couldn't remember many words or how to spell tham and didn't have my dictionary. I did not study any more Spanish yesterday. Then I showed just how confused I was by conjugating "traducir" as "traduciré" which is the future tense when I probably should have used the subjunctive (or maybe the conditional tense).

Today has been better, after studying math and chemistry last night (No languages at all, I was too frustrated by Spanish), this morning I woke up thinking about Spanish Swedish and Finnish words and almost said "Hyvää morgon" to someone on my way to school, which may mean I'm getting very disoriented!?!? Well not really, more likely I was just in a hurry to get to my chemistry class on time.

I did buy a Langenscheidt Swedish-English dictionary Monday afternoon and now all I need is to find one for Finnish. I've also run into some trouble with my wordlists for Finnish; I'm not sure how to make them work for an agglutinative language. When most words can take one of fourteen case endings in both the present and past tense and then there are more sufixes it seems insufficient to simply write the nominative form of "kirja" and then go on to another word; I think I'll try including the partitive and genitive forms as well, especially because the genitive case often requires stem changes, that is to say the consonant gradation stuff I've mentioned before. The other languages I'm learning don't present the same problems; although the various conjugations of Spanish verbs don't appear in my wordlists, I make separate pages for those based the relevant tense. I've yet to complete more than one worlist for Swedish, but I want to have at least two more done by Monday.

Now back to learning Swedish
Mick

Edited by mick33 on 01 October 2009 at 9:24pm

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Iversen
Super Polyglot
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Denmark
berejst.dk
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 Message 170 of 223
02 October 2009 at 1:04am | IP Logged 
As far as I know there are some welldefined stem changes in a certain number of cases (the same each time), so instead of writing the changed forms you could just indicate that there is a consonant gradation in a certain word (or an alternation of stems ending in consonant and in vowel). This is not really different from indicating that a Spanish verb has the alternation o-ue in its forms, or maybe that a certain English verb is strong (i.e. has vowel changes between its tenses). Writing three forms for every verb will slow you down.


Edited by Iversen on 02 October 2009 at 1:04am

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DaraghM
Diglot
Senior Member
Ireland
Joined 6148 days ago

1947 posts - 2923 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian

 
 Message 171 of 223
02 October 2009 at 11:23am | IP Logged 
mick33 wrote:
, ojalá que seré


You're Spanish is very good, but I noticed you used the future tense after 'Ojalá que'. This phrase is normally followed by the subjunctive, so it should be, 'ojalá que sea'. I hope this proves I love reading your log. :-)

Edited by DaraghM on 02 October 2009 at 11:25am

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mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 172 of 223
02 October 2009 at 8:01pm | IP Logged 
mick33 wrote:
   

When most words can take one of fourteen case endings in both the present and past tense and then there are more sufixes it seems insufficient to simply write the nominative form of "kirja" and then go on to another word; I think I'll try including the partitive and genitive forms as well, especially because the genitive case often requires stem changes, that is to say the consonant gradation stuff I've mentioned before.
I really should do a better job of proofreading my posts. I meant to say that the case endings change based on whether a word is singular or plural; present or past tense does not matter here.

Iversen wrote:
As far as I know there are some welldefined stem changes in a certain number of cases (the same each time), so instead of writing the changed forms you could just indicate that there is a consonant gradation in a certain word (or an alternation of stems ending in consonant and in vowel). This is not really different from indicating that a Spanish verb has the alternation o-ue in its forms, or maybe that a certain English verb is strong (i.e. has vowel changes between its tenses). Writing three forms for every verb will slow you down.

Yes, trying to write at least three forms for nearly every word did indeed slow me down. I made another mistake in my previous post, I should have remembered that nouns, pronouns, adjectives, numbers when written out are impacted by the various case endings far more than the verbs are, though I think verbs can sometimes be affected by the case endings as well.
1 person has voted this message useful



mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 173 of 223
02 October 2009 at 8:04pm | IP Logged 
DaraghM wrote:
mick33 wrote:
, ojalá que seré


You're Spanish is very good, but I noticed you used the future tense after 'Ojalá que'. This phrase is normally followed by the subjunctive, so it should be, 'ojalá que sea'. I hope this proves I love reading your log. :-)
Thanks, Daragh! So that was another mistake I made. When I look at the sentence again; the subjunctive makes more sense there.

Edited by mick33 on 02 October 2009 at 11:24pm

1 person has voted this message useful



mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 174 of 223
06 October 2009 at 1:13am | IP Logged 
mick33 wrote:
   I've yet to complete more than one worlist for Swedish, but I want to have at least two more done by Monday.

Now back to learning Swedish
Mick
Shows what I know, this weekend was so busy that I started on a few wordlists for both Swedish and Finnish but didn't complete them. So I will work on that tonight and tomorrow. I will also start using newspaper articles for scriptorium in Finnish, but I'm not ready to do so with Swedish every time I try to pronounce Swedish words I get self-conscious because I still don't know which syllable I should be stressing.

Mick

Edited by mick33 on 07 October 2009 at 10:39pm

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mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 175 of 223
08 October 2009 at 2:21am | IP Logged 
Sv: Tisdagskväll har jag antligen lärd mer ordfärråd. För senaste veckorna har jag försökte lära mer ord, men jag glömte ofta nya ord. Jag blev mycket frustrerande med min oförmåga att gör framsteg. Mest av allt tycker att jag men stavningen kämpade, men det kan jag inte förstå. Vanligtvis när lärande främmande språk stavningen är min högst tillgång.

Yikes! I'm sure there are some grammatical mistakes and possibly some poor word choices, which I will have to correct, in the above sentences. Right now I'm focusing on finally having posted something in Swedish. I needed the practice, although I may have only proved that I still have not learned much Swedish yet. What I meant to write was that I finally learned more Swedish vocabulary Tuesday night. For the last few weeks I had been trying learn Swedish words; but I often forgot them, which was very frustrating. Perhaps it's the spelling of Swedish words I struggle with the most, but I can't understand why that would be. Spelling is usually my greatest strength when learning languages.

I've also been really focusing on consonant gradation in Finnish, and I will explain how it works in my next post.

Vi ses snart
Mick

Edited by mick33 on 10 November 2009 at 12:24am

1 person has voted this message useful



mick33
Senior Member
United States
Joined 5921 days ago

1335 posts - 1632 votes 
Speaks: English*
Studies: Finnish
Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish

 
 Message 176 of 223
09 October 2009 at 12:59am | IP Logged 
It's about time I finally begin to grasp the concept of konsonantinvaihtelu (I decided to
use the Finnish term for consonant gradation, hopefully this will be a part of helping me to
think in Finnish), so I think this is a good time to briefly explain how this works. First
thing to know is that there are two consonant grades: Strong grade and weak grade. These two
grades are a way to mark in writing two sound alternations that most often affect the
following consonants and consonant clusters: k, p, t, tt, kk, pp, mp, nk, nt though these
are only the most common consonants and the ones I remember right now. Strong grade is the
one used in the nominative form of a word (and the one most likely to be listed in a
dictionary) and is usually found when a syllable ends in a vowel. The weak grade is used in
the genitive and/or accusative cases and usually occurs in closed syllables, that is to say
those syllables which end in a consonant and the weak grade causes changes to the stem of a
word which also apply to certain other case endings.

The first example of this feature that I learned was
Strong grade Weak grade
matto(carpet) maton
mato(worm)    madon

Note that in the weak grade the first word loses a "t" and in the second word the "t"
chnages to "d".

Now two more examples: this time showing what can happen to "kk" and "pp"
though these examples will also show some of the other casses which require the strong or
weak grade respectively.
Nominatinve stem (strong   grade):       
nominatiivi: tukka (hair) reppu (backpack)
illatiivi: tukkaan reppuun or reppuhun (second form is older and used in poetic language)


Genitive stem (weak grade)
tukka and reppu will become
genitiivi: tukan repun
inessiivi: tukassa repussa
elatiivi: tukasta repusta
adessiivi: tukalla
ablatiivi: tukalta
allatiivi: tukalle
translatiivi: tukaksi

Well there's still more I need to explain but I'll have to review my notes first. Earlier
today I also found a website called learnfinnish.org but one of the problems with using a
computer at school is that the following message appeared:

"A user from this IP address (I figured I should remove the actual IP address) was accepted
to use our Language Lab for FREE. His or her thanks to us was to hack our server on which
the language software is running. To avoid such unfortunate situation, Learnfinnish.org can
only be used by trusted and serious people who want to learn Finnish by themselves. All
previous unidentified registered users at Learnfinnish.org have been deleted.


To register at Learnfinnish.org, please send a request to: info(at)learnfinnish.org."

While I understand the desire to avoid being hacked; I'm not sure it would be worthwhile to
send an email just so I can browse the site. Perhaps I'll wait until tomorrow when my
computer at home will finally be repaired and again have a internet connection, since I will
probably be using that computer more now.

Yesterday I forgot to mention that I found out that the verbix site doesn't work very well
for Swedish verbs; indeed verbix does better with Finnish verbs though there is a better
site for Finnish conjugations.

I think I'll review how to make words plural in Swedish now.

Mick
Oct. 9 2009 EDIT I decided to fix the typo that Leopejo pointed out to me, so the illatiivi
form of "tukka" listed is now correct.


Edited by mick33 on 09 February 2021 at 5:28am



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