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The Awesome Difficulty of Korean, Finnish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6550 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes  Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 33 of 559 15 May 2012 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I don't think the open and closed 'e' that Latvian has can be attributed to vowel harmony. In fact, vowel harmony was a new concept for me when I started learning Finnish. The things that are easier in Finnish because of knowing Latvian are speaking and listening comprehension. As I mentioned earlier, Finnish has only two vowels that don't exist in Latvian, all the other sounds are pronounced pretty much the same so it's familiar and easy - much easier than to learn how to read in English, Russian, or German. Also, I get a kick out of every time I come across a Finnish word that looks like a Latvian word. Usually they don't mean the same thing (except for 'maksaa' and 'vai' and maybe some others) but it's still fun. For example, the word 'aste' means 'degree' in Finnish but 'tail' in Latvian. Finnish My Anki word count is 395. I like that the number is going up quite quickly but I had to do about 40 reviews yesterday and today. I don't like that many reviews, I want to keep it light, and nice, and easy (otherwise I'll get overwhelmed and stop using Anki at all) so I'll probably slow down a bit and see how it goes. I'd like to keep the daily reviews under 30. I'm still studying lesson 6 of my textbook. I'm not spending much time on it, maybe 10-15 minutes a day, so I haven't gotten to the exercises part yet. I'm just reviewing the grammar and texts and trying to make it stick. The grammar is the outside location cases and how to form the singular imperative form for verbs. Oh, and I finally created a document for verbs that should be followed by a certain case. So far it has only three verbs (jäädä, käydä, pitää) but lesson 6 has some more (tuoksua and such). Korean I spent some time on Korean yesterday doing Unit 3 on the SNU website. I did all the exercises until the reading section. I worked through the first text and it was so difficult that I didn't want to do the second text right away. It seems ridiculous, after all the text was so short and easy... But the main problem for me was that I hadn't been introduced to the words 'hometown', 'Chicago', 'major' and 'economics' before. It took me several times of reading and listening until I even noticed that there were topic marking particles following two of those words. This is one reason why studying Korean is so much harder for me than studying Finnish. If I encounter a new word in a Finnish text I can read it and recognize it in speech right away but in Korean I need to read the word at least 5 times and listen to it 10 times and still I have trouble remembering it two minutes later. But I do love the website. They test all kinds of skills with their exercises. I spent maybe less than 2 hours on it and I'm sure it was very useful for me. I learned some professions and nationalities. Maybe someone can tell me how to say "I'm from Latvia" in Korean? And how would I write my name in Korean? They don't have a 'v' sound. Hmm. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5533 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 34 of 559 15 May 2012 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The "V" sound in English loan words is often converted to a ㅂ in Korean.
Examples: video > 비디오 DVD > 디비디 V (the English pronuncation of the letter itself) > 브이 Venus > 비너스 That said, though, this is based on English pronunciation. If the "V" in Latvian makes a different sound than the English "V", then whatever is the closest equivalent in Korean would be the likely chosen consonant. If "Evita" is pronounced like it is in Spanish, then I would opt for something like: 에비타 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Pisces Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4620 days ago 143 posts - 284 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish*, French, SwedishC1, Esperanto Studies: German, Spanish, Russian | Message 35 of 559 15 May 2012 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Great that you're learning Finnish! I just noticed this thread. I'll try to answer if you have questions, but I don't really know the grammar explicitly.
A friend of mine told me that her Latin professor said that the Finns and the Latvians are the best among Europeans at pronouncing Latin and reading Latin poetry correctly because both languages have double vowels and double consonants, and because in both the stress of a word isn't related to vowel length. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6550 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 36 of 559 15 May 2012 at 11:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's a great rule to know. I already noticed that when a foreign word has two consonants next to each other Koreans insert a 으 to divide the syllables properly.
Thanks, that seems about right. But it's going to be difficult to get used to the 'p' sound in my name.
I'm glad to know I'm not just imagining this similarity. And I don't know much about Latin but I've always gotten the impression that it's really easy to pronounce so the Latin professor must be right. Here's a little practice in my target languages: Minä olen Evita. Olen latvialainen. 저는 에비타예요. 라트비아 사람이에요. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6550 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 37 of 559 16 May 2012 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Finnish
I decided to post a couple of grammar exercises here. If anyone could point out my mistakes I'd be very grateful. The task is to put the nouns and the pronouns in the correct case. (It's exercise no.4 of lesson 6 of my textbook.) a) Minä olen Venäjälta (Latviasta). Kuka asuu Tampereella? Turisti matkustaa Lontooseen. Sinä istut minun tuolillani. Kissa nukkuu matolla. Kukka on pienella ikkunalla. Raha on valkoisessa kassessa. Yliopisto on Kalevantiella. Liisa antaa Pekalle anteeksi. Minulla on syntymäpäivä tässä kuussa. Menetko sinä autolla vai bussilla? Ulkomaalaiset käyvät suomen kurssissa. Millä sinä menet työhön? Vanhemmat asuvat maassa. Voitko sinä sanoa minulle, missä suomen kurssi on? b) Rouva Toivonen on opettaja. Hän opettaa yliopistossa. Aamulla hän menee yliopistoon. Hän on koko päivän yliopistossa. Iltapäivällä hän tulee yliopistosta ja menee kotiin. Lauantaiaamuna hän lähtee pois kotoa. Hän menee kauppatoriin ja apteekiin. Iltapäivällä hän lähtee perheensä kanssa oopperaan. Toivosen perhe asuu Vantaalla, mutta ooppera on Helsingissä. He lähtevät sinne bussilla tai omalla pienella autolla. Phew, this took me about half an hour. 90% of these words are in my Anki so I didn't have to look them up. I used google to find out whether Vantaassa or Vantaalla was the correct form, and in a couple of other cases too. It helps that I have actually been to the airport in Vantaa so it's not all abstract to me. Korean I'm up to lesson 14 of TTMIK in my repeat listening and up to lesson 24 overall. I'll listen to the final lesson of level 1 tomorrow and then I'll keep reviewing everything until Sunday because Sunday is when I decided I'll try the test. Maybe it's too soon but I start work on Monday so I wanted to kind of finish the first level before that. I expect I won't understand very much because there's a lot of vocabulary in the later lessons that I still haven't learned but I want to try it anyway. We'll see how it goes. One thing I can't believe I forgot to mention about Korean is the word 네 (yes). It's pronounced the same as the Latvian word 'nē' (no). It's so frustrating to hear the word 'no' all the time in the TTMIK lessons and every time I must force my brain to realize it actually means 'yes'. I think sometimes I don't even notice that my brain hears 'no' instead of 'yes' and I don't correct it. Ugh. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Pisces Bilingual Pentaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4620 days ago 143 posts - 284 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish*, French, SwedishC1, Esperanto Studies: German, Spanish, Russian | Message 38 of 559 16 May 2012 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Pretty good. Just a few small mistakes: Kukka on pienellä ikkunalla. I'm not sure about this one actually; it's right to say "kukka on ikkunalla" "the flower is in the window/on the window-sill", but it sounds wrong to say "kukka on pienellä ikkunalla" - I would say "kukka on pienessä ikkunassa". "Kukka on ikkunassa" seems to imply that you're looking in from outside. Kalevantiellä - ä not a (vowel harmony) Menetkö - ö not o …valkoisessa kassissa. (i not e in kassissa) …käyvät suomen kurssilla ("käydä kurssilla" is an idiom) It's more common to say "mennä töihin" than "työhön". (plural) Vanhemmat asuvat maassa means "in (some) country" - this is a pretty unusual thing to say, by itself - asuvat maalla means "in the country" (not the city) [probably what they want] "menee yliopistolle" "…on koko päivän yliopistolla" "tulee yliopistolta" Yliopisto is tricky: if you are thinking about the university as a place you say "olla yliopistolla", "tulla yliopistolta" but if you think about it as an institution it's "opettaa/opiskella yliopistossa", etc. But these get mixed up a lot, even by native speakers, I think. menee kauppatorille (in Finnish you are always 'torilla' - 'on the marketplace' because it's thought to be a wide open area, so you say "mennä torille") You might be interested in these pairs (more advanced, so don't worry about them): olla metsässä – be in the forest olla metsällä — be hunting in the forest olla järvellä – be on the lake in a boat (e.g. fishing) olla järvessä – be in the lake (in the water) olla haudalla – visit a grave, be on a grave (e.g. flowers) olla haudassa – be in the grave (buried), also it means just "be dead" apteekkiin (double k) These are not easy, I had to think about some of them quite a lot. Edited by Pisces on 16 May 2012 at 11:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 39 of 559 16 May 2012 at 11:33pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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| Evita Tetraglot Senior Member Latvia learnlatvian.info Joined 6550 days ago 734 posts - 1036 votes Speaks: Latvian*, English, German, Russian Studies: Korean, Finnish | Message 40 of 559 17 May 2012 at 12:07am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Pisces, those are really detailed corrections, I appreciate them. Thank you! It's not easy to decide between the inside and outside location cases (it's a new concept for me) so I thought I needed some help. Apparently I was right.
I actually knew that I was writing "the parents live in a country" but I didn't know any alternative. "In the country" makes more sense indeed, haha. "käydä kurssilla" - well, that was just mean (of my textbook). Sticking in an idiom like that with no warning? Not cool. What you write about yliopisto and tori makes sense. I suspect the little mistakes regarding vowel harmony and consonant gradation will be my biggest problem in the long run. At least until I start reading a lot (and who knows if/when that will happen). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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