|
 |
Doviende’s Swedish Log (TAC2010 - Team J) | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 17 of 65 22 December 2009 at 1:27am | IP Logged | ||
|
I almost managed to hit my 27-hour listening goal while I was at work over the past two weeks. I actually got 25 hours in, so it was close enough. On the weekend I watched "The Little Mermaid" in Swedish ("Den Lilla Sjöjungfrun"), which was amusing. Actually, I find the title amusing too, because if I were to guess the translation based on my German knowledge, mermaid looks like "sea virgin". I guess "maid" in English can have the connotation of "virgin", but I never really think about the parts of the word separately.
Today my book and audiobook of The Hobbit ("Hobbiten") arrived from bokus.com, so I can start my L-R project. I'll probably balance my L-R time with some intensive work, comparing each sentence to the German version in Der Kleine Hobbit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 18 of 65 22 December 2009 at 7:19am | IP Logged | ||
|
I started reading Hobbiten, and I love it. The narrator has a great voice and a pleasant accent. This is becoming quite an interesting experience for me, because I'm learning straight from a real novel, Kato Lomb style. I have no instructional book about Swedish, so I'm just looking at the Swedish version and then at the German version to compare. I'm also looking up some stuff on google translate, to get some of the individual words where the German and Swedish versions significantly differ.
So far it seems like the Swedish version is less wordy than the German version. For instance, when describing Bilbo's hobbit hole, the German version says "gemütlich frühstücken" (comfortably eat breakfast), where the Swedish version says "inget att äta" (something to eat). There are several other spots where far fewer words are used, rather than just simplified versions. I guess it's maybe a bit more kid-friendly, which is also learner-friendly. If I were awesome at Swedish already, I might disapprove of this, but for now it's pretty good. I find that it's also fun to read the German book while listening to the Swedish audio. This makes it easy to pick out the words that are the same, although the shortened nature of the Swedish version means that I have to skip over a lot in the German version to keep up with the audio. It's really encouraging to work through a whole paragraph and understand everything in it, and then to listen to it over and over and try to get it. I think I probably have to practice ignoring more of the words...I can always learn the harder ones later on. Right now I want to focus on any that are really frequent, or that directly correspond to an English or German cognate. One thing that puzzles me in these translations is their translation of some of the names. Why does Bilbo Baggins have to be Bilbo Beutlin in German and Bilbo Secker in Swedish? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachjunge Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 7165 days ago 368 posts - 548 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 19 of 65 22 December 2009 at 8:02am | IP Logged | ||
|
Hi, Doviende! Great job with your logs, they are quite inspirational. To answer your question about the names, for once the translators got it precisely right: "Baggins" in English makes us think of bags and sacks; a "bagger" is evoked, if such a thing were to exist. In German, "Beutel" means bag or sack, depending on the context, so "Beutlin" to a German evokes precisely the same loose association. I don't speak Swedish, but given that it's a Germanic language, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that "Secker" is related to "Säcke," the German plural for sack, and conjures up the same thing.
Edited by Sprachjunge on 22 December 2009 at 8:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 20 of 65 22 December 2009 at 8:07am | IP Logged | ||
|
OHHHH, that seems obvious now. I never actually thought of his name as something "translatable". I never thought of bags when I heard Baggins. It just seemed like more of a consonance thing with the Bs, which is kept with "Beutlin", but lost with "Secker".
Thanks for clearing things up :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Strongman Diglot Newbie Australia Joined 5702 days ago 8 posts - 9 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 21 of 65 22 December 2009 at 9:55am | IP Logged | ||
|
I couldn't resist going from lurking to posting when I saw that you'd been talking about the pronunciation of the /sj/ sound, AND had recently watched Den Lilla Sjöjungfrun.
I just had to give you a little phrase I used to demonstrate making this sound with my old Swedish tutor: Sju sjösjuka sjöjungfruar. Someone more inventive could add a related verb and expand on it a bit, but I had enough fun just battling my way around those three words. I also wanted to suggest that if you want a concise, but accessible grammar reference to use with your long texts you can't go past the Åke Viberg and co. book. If I had the equivalent in any other target language I would be in heaven. Good luck with your Swedish studies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6909 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 65 23 December 2009 at 12:16am | IP Logged | ||
Actually, Bilbo was called "Bagger" in Britt G. Hallqvist's translation (which was the main one until a few years ago). Åke Ohlmarks who translated the Lord of the Rings also called him Bagger. However, the very first translation of "The Hobbit" by Tore Zetterholm (from 1947) had Bimbo Backlin as the main character. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 23 of 65 24 December 2009 at 6:38am | IP Logged | ||
|
I've switched things up a bit today. I read through "Swedish: An Essential Grammar", and found it moderately interesting. I had no intention of trying to memorize anything, but I found it to be full of good examples, and good explanations of some of the exceptions. A lot of the examples helped me make sense of some of the things I'd seen in Hobbiten.
I also took a look through the list of 2000 common words that someone pointed me to. It has 2000 words, and each word has one or more example sentences made of of fairly easy words. It's ideal material for flashcards. I haven't gone through it methodically, since it's alphabetical and I find that really annoying. Instead, I just scroll through until something catches my eye. I also sometimes paste large chunks of it into google translate, just to see if there are some interesting words that I'd like to learn. So far I've added 72 cards to Anki, some of which are from Hobbiten (and therefore also include audio clipped from the audiobook), and some of which are example sentences from either the grammar book or the 2000 word file. I'm finding that it's fun just to mess around with a bunch of materials and look at whatever words I can. I'm gradually getting a sense for some of the words, especially the main connective words that occur really frequently. I still haven't tried the Chorus method for pronunciation, but I'm a little self-conscious about doing it with people around, and I haven't had too much time to myself lately. I think I want to know just a little bit more about the language before I dive into that though. I don't have anyone immediately on hand to explain the intricacies of each sentence as I say them, so I'll have to figure all that stuff out for myself when the time comes. Next I'm downloading the FSI swedish audio files, just to see what sort of stuff is in there. As long as I always have many different sources of material, then I can hop around and keep myself interested. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5986 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 24 of 65 29 December 2009 at 7:50am | IP Logged | ||
|
I have 168 anki cards now, and I've spent a little bit more time doing intensive work on the first few pages of Hobbiten. I've been busy, but I'm trying to do a little bit each day. It already feels like I'm ready to start doing extensive reading now, since I've learned many of the most frequent words, and found many that are easy to remember because they're similar to either English or German. With a story that I know, like The Hobbit, I'm pretty confident that I can get a lot out of just reading it now.
This is making me quite confident in my previous recommendations that people start reading a real book as soon as possible. So far I've done 30 hours of raw listening (before I knew anything about the language), and somewhere around 15 - 20 hours of study using a variety of methods. For a closely-related language like this, that seems to be enough to get the basic idea of a lot of the sentences in this book. Next on my list is some serious L-R time, like multiple hours per day if I can. I'm curious to see if this can produce the miraculous benefits that have been claimed. EDIT: Ya, that's totally not happening right now. Spoken Swedish is still frustratingly incomprehensible to me most of the time, even if I can figure out what's being said when I look at the words slowly. Right now it's just more fun to do intensive reading than to try to listen. Edited by doviende on 29 December 2009 at 9:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
