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What Expug is doing in 2015 (TAC n more) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 265 of 364 03 August 2015 at 11:36pm | IP Logged |
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A weekend that shouldn't be forgotten. I happened to read my first text aimed for native speakers in Georgian extensively and understand it quite fine. It was from the collection კარი გამიღე about a girl who find out she has been soropositive for at least 10 years and has to contact her previous partners. The text uses living language and has plenty of dialogues, which helped immensely. I might have 80% of comprehension but I understood many more words. I know there is still a long hill to climb and I couldn't understand the following text as well, but it's a threshold for sure. I am quite sure my Georgian is far better than my Russian, because the next day I kept reading the book I have to finish at home (only 60 pages now, so, three weekends) and I still couldn't understand 40% of it. I also watched Pastewka, finally finished the first episode 'One and a half summer' and logged it (too early to say how much it can do to my Mandarin, it's English-subtitles only at Viki), listened to meditation in Norwegian (though I had trouble focusing, I seem to be getting better each day), read some pages in French and two in Mandarin.
There are a lot of voiced-over series and cartoons in Georgian, not only from Russian, but also from English (so I don't need to worry about finding transcripts and pasting them at Google Trans. The problem is that voice over becomes even more annoying when you understand the original language. I tried with Timon and Pumbaa and the voiced-over Georgian even has a delay compared to the one from Kuxnya, for instance. Well, it's a matter of getting used if I want to reach my goals for Georgian. At least I'm relieved that I won't run out of dubbed Georgian resources in the long run and maybe soon enough I'll be understanding native Georgian without subtitles and making all this voiced-over discussion obsolete. Besides, Kuxnya alone has at least 45 episodes more waiting (I've been through more than 30 already, not enough for some breakthrough but I'm improving). I found the Estonian text harder to read today. Maybe because it started to use the past tense. Maybe because it was a little more boring than usual. Maybe it's the allergic crisis after all. I went to a village near the city and wasn't that cold but too windy especially at night. I reached my half challenge in Norwegian. I'm still working on my Super Challenge even though I never signed up for twitter. I don't find it reasonable that one is supposed to sign up for a social network outside of the community in order to take part on a challenge proposed within the community, and I always regarded the Twitter Bot as optional anyway. My studies are logged on a spreadsheet I update online everytime I do some SC activity and I have even added remarks for each resource I start. So, when the time comes, I'll be glad to share this spreadsheet for audits. Anyway, here are my stats: French books full challenge: 8490/5000 pages French video full challenge: 165/150 hours Norwegian books half challenge: 2778/2500 Norwegian video half challenge: 75/75 Mandarin books half challenge: 2161/2500 Mandarin video half challenge: 129/75 Georgian books half challenge: 1459/2500 Georgian video half challenge: 67/75 German books half challenge: 2934/2500 German video half challenge: 82/75 Russian books half challenge: 1911/2500 Russian video half challenge: 92/75 I had signed up for a full challenge (100 books=5000 pages and 100 films = 150 hours) in French and for half challenges in Norwegian, Mandarin, Georgian, German and Russian. I expect to reach all of my goals. Even when the page count seems low, it is still doable considering there are 20 weeks left in 2015 and slightly more than 100 weekdays. I'm doing my supplementary reading for Georgian and Russian mostly at the weekends anyway, so for these specific stats it doesn't matter much whether there is a weekday or a holiday. In the case of video, it does matter, because only on weekdays I can focus enough to spend long hours studying without getting distracted. I need less than 400 pages in Mandarin, and I'm doing 4 pages a day, sometimes 5 or 6; I need less than 600 pages in Russian, and I'm doing 7 pages a day = 700 pages, plus 20 each weekend which brings another 400 pages. Georgian is a bit more tricky, because I need over 1000 pages and I'm still averaging 40 pages a week, x 20 = 800. But then Georgian is the language I'm closer to becoming an independent reader at. What is critical now is to find material for reading at the tablet at weekends, because of the two online Georgian bookstores I buy ebooks from, only 1 works properly at iOs and it's not where the majority of my books are, at least not those I would read extensively guilty-free as they cover accessory topics and not the core of my interests. I still believe I can do it and I also hope the results will be good as well, i.e. my Georgian will get better after that, as I notice I'm approaching a critical mass in terms of input. Today's L-R of Herr alle Dinge was a bit more comfortable, in spite of allergic crisis, being late of schedule and anything else. I believe it's not just a matter of getting used to the story; it still has plenty of long sentences and paragraphs and few dialogues. I think it's German that is starting to click. The Russian series from Starmedia are short, the first one, Wind in the face is only 4 episodes long. This is good and bad. It's good because I can get exposure to a lot of materials, but it's bad that I soon have to search for more. Now, at least with the latest transcripts popping up out there I won't run out of resources that soon. Not to mention the quality of the latest series that is outstanding. Finally the business letters are over at Perfectionnement Italien. I like business dialogues (as in Le français des affaires), but not business letters or any letters in textbooks. What if you have no idea whether a resource is being useful or not? I don't mean it like "Oh, I don't think it's been of help", I do mean "I'm watching it and I'm enjoying it, but I can't assess how much I've been learning from it". I'm speaking of Kuxnya dubbed in Georgian. The best way to evaluate that would be to try one day without subtitles. Well, maybe tomorrow. I finished Kuxnya just a few minutes before leaving. So, no time for output yet. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 266 of 364 04 August 2015 at 11:32pm | IP Logged |
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The Georgian half challenge is the challenge that matters now. I came to conclusion that I need 60 pages a week to be comfortable, because the last week of the year is holidays. Yesterday I read two more pages when I got home, but I need more. Either 8 pages a day mon-fri plus 20 at the weekend or 7 a day mon-fri plus 25 at the weekend. I should just try to do as much as possible at the weekend while I can. In a few weeks I will be reading basically just Georgian and Mandarin during the weekends as I'm going to finish the book in Russian I read at home, and the Russian challenge is going at a much more comfortable pace (doing 35 pages mon-fri when I only need 600 pages more). Let's see what is going to happen.
Today's Estonian text was easier, just like the previous ones. Maybe the problem yesterday was lack of concentration due to the factors I mentioned, indeed. I listened to most of the Georgian series while reading the forum, but towards the end I came to senses and started watching it and paying attention. It helped, because I could follow the scene. Not bad with German listening-reading. I only got lost a few times. I noticed it takes me over 20 minutes of listening to reach 10 pages in the book. That's a lot, more than for Norwegian. One more evidence that listening-reading becomes unpractical with time. It's not quite the same with watching Otto der Ausserfriesisch without subtitles. Sometimes I let my attention wander, as is the case with stuff that doesn't have subtitles. Today I could pay attention for more than half the extract I was watching, and I got the hang of what was going on most of the times. I am far from being able to say I really can watch German video extensively, though. I had less trouble than usual watching Futurama in German today, had to look up few words. But then I am still too focused on reading thr subtitles and haven't gotten used to listening more yet. Payed more attention to watching Kuxnya today and how I interpret the Georgian. I really see some improvement, and I start to understand some patterns even for longer sentences. Sometimes, though, I understand just the subtitles, not enough time to process the Georgian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 267 of 364 05 August 2015 at 11:48pm | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I crammed two more pages of Georgian in the evening, so I got 7 again. If I manage 7 a day from Monday to Friday, I'm still going to need 25 at the weekend in order to reach my current goal of 60 pages a week.
On the other hand, I finished today the last story from Citybooks (thank you again, iguanamon). I decided I'm going to review an existing course, probably 'Georgian Language and Culture: A continuing Course'. If this is the case, then I'm going to gain at least a couple of extra pages each day. I have the advantage now that a kind soul published at Unilang the translations to all the dialogues, and I also have the notes from when I discussed the same dialogues with HoneyBuzzard there at Unilang as well. Best day with listening to 'Norwegian Wood' in Norwegian. I can understand over 90% of what I hear in Norwegian and even when I get distracted it's easy to find the spot again at the Portuguese text. Now I think I'm working more on consolidating and activating what I already know (Serpent has a name for this, the unknown knowns or something like that), words that I usually would recognize in context in print form but still wouldn't pop up in my conversation or I wouldn't be able to understand fast enough when listening to them to keep understanding the audio in real time. Only now I realized that my edition of Herr Alle Dinge has 710 pages! And I'm doing only 10 pages a day. At this rhythm, it will take me months to finish it. Well, at least I'm assured several weeks of comprehensible audio input in German. All the playlists of Starmedia (Russian with English subtitles). So far I'm not understanding that much, not as much as in Poor Nastya's times. Can't wait to start watching other stuff with Russian subtitles! Finally Futurama is becoming a bit easier. Not so in the beginning, when the characters discuss what they are going to do, so there are longer sentences, but later I have to look up few words. Today I also tried to pay more attention to the audio. Kuxnya is doing good for my Georgian. At least I really hope it is. I'm learning a bit more each day. Today there were both scenes where I was lost with the badly translated subtitles and the audio didn't help and scenes where I could only understand the Georgian and nothing else. I still get lost but not so often. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 268 of 364 07 August 2015 at 12:06am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I nailed 5 more pages in Georgian in the evening! (total 11). I started to understand quite a bit even from longer narrative periods, but not as much as my 'breakthrough text' of last Saturday yet. I also read 2 more pages in Mandarin, as I had forgotten to read from Chinesereadingpractice.com .
I was really tired yesterday, even though I went through the main part of my studies, up to the Uzbek dabbling - where I even read less - 1 hour earlier than expected. It's not so the number of hours studied that causes burnout, but also the amount of stuff studied. I noticed this from the previous two days this week: even though I was finishing tasks earlier by a half hour or an hour, I was likewise tired, or even a little more - the way you obviously becomes more tired when you run instead of walking, but now I'm talking about mental efforts. I have to find a compromise. I think reading the new forum constantly concurs to my being more tired. I'm still not used to the layout, with narrower column texts and smaller fonts on a more blurred background. I'm used to large, common, black font on light yellow background, at great legibility. As a result, I am not participating as much as I would want to, especially at my friends' logs. I hope I can find a way to keep participating the forum without feeling overwhelmed. I'm still consistently listening to the same meditation clip in Norwegian before I sleep. It is 12 minutes long and I'm starting to understand a lot from it. The background music is nice, too. As a result, I'm averaging 40 minutes a day of Norwegian listening. I do hope it 'clicks' somehow in the next week, though I also think I need to resume writing so I can activate and thus reinforce the words I'm starting to learn maturely these days. I keep saying that I try my best not to repeat the same mistakes wtih Estonian that I did with Georgian. After over a year of Estonian, I have a much better command of the language than I had after, maybe, two years of Georgian. I can read texts and spot the functions of the words with much less trouble (I'm aware it's more difficult in Georgian because a verb, a noun and an adjective can have similar endings/final syllables). Today as I read the text of the lesson I realized how much I can already understand. So, perhaps when I go for native materials I will at a better passive level than I'd expect, I won't be at a crude A2-/A2- but maybe even A2-/B1. Going through the same vocabulary and rules over several textbooks, always paying attention, translating with the help of Google (which I couldn't do at my first two years of Georgian) has proved to be quite effective. My mood helps a lot: I'm not in a hurry to reach a higher level in Estonian so I can start another language, not really. I won't be surprised if my Estonian soon catches up with my Russian. It helps to have a language with a comfortable orthography in the latin alphabet (apart from not always marking 3rd-degree length, which can still be spot grammatically, though). The best and easiest day of reading from 'I read Russian'. The text was an interview. I particularly liked the quote from the philosopher Berdjajev: Экономика менее всего может создать нового человека. Экономика относится к средствам, а не к целям жИзни. И когда её делают целью жИзни, происходит деградация человека."Least than anything, economy can't create a new human being. Economy refers to the means, not the goals of life. And when it is made the purpose of life, we see the degradation of the human being". Started reviewing 'A Continuing Course'. The first dialogue has way too many notes now (yes, I got the translation and I had already been through the dialogue when I first studied this book). I will try my best to learn what I didn't at my first wave. I hope to solve many remaining grammar doubts and memorize some important verbal forms, especially when it comes to distinguishing aorist, future, present, perfect and pluperfect. I will try my best not to 'let go' as I still did sometimes with the Georgian Newspaper Reader, because that's not what a 'second wave' with a textbook is meant for. If I notice it's getting tiresome again, I may even switch to another resource. I hope this 'wave' helps me accomplish both goals: consolidating my grammar knowledge and adding up more pages for the SC count. Today I counted two from the first dialogue, but I hope in the next ones, with less notes, I can read more than 2 a day. I don't know about you guys, but one thing I learned to enjoy is googling for placenames in contemporary novels or textbooks and finding out how they look like. I've done it ofte about China and France. Today, for example, I read about the church "Saint-Médard" in Paris, in "La carte et le territoire". It is an interactive way of reading that would be unthinkable 30 years ago and that reinforces my preference for contemporary novels on daily life situations. It's one way of becoming familiarized with places from the countries that speak your target language. There's also the other side: the joy of reading a description of a place you've been to before, and recognizing each detail. I feel this when reading about Rome at Dan Brown's Angels and Demons. Even though I stayed there for two days, there are very few places in the book that I haven't seen in person. DLI Uzbek became hard now. It's giving me burnout. Three to four topics introduced at once, with a lot of vocabulary. I remember now why I found the Georgian one so hard. I don't plan on putting too much effort on a language I'm just dabbling in. I'm learning to analize and appreciate the Uzbek grammar, and that's enough. I shouldn't worry about actually memorizing stuff, as I already have a lot on my plate each day. At least now I know why i've been tired the past days. The ironic thing about Kuxnya is that long, narrated phrases tend to be faster than the normal dialogues. I'm making progress, that's what's important. There are still at least 40 episodes more left for me to improve my Georgian. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 269 of 364 07 August 2015 at 11:42pm | IP Logged |
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Yesterday I started a Georgian book by Aka Morchiladze, in pdf, so I can read it at my old tablet and make use of more hidden moments. I was waiting for my colleagues to finish their workday so we could go for a happy-hour, and so I could read 5 pages from it. I didn't understand as much as I did from the stories I mentioned earlier, but I like so much reading at a font size that is closer to reality and quite pleasant to the eyes. It is the same as the edition I read of 'Lord of the Flies', large and beautiful. I can't get tired from reading this. I hope I can read more today. Even though I went out yesterday (after a couple of hours with people from work I met some friends from uni time I had only met twice this year and we got updated on each other's projects. I went to bed later than usual but woke up in the usual time, I just couldn't sleep longer and felt like goping to the gym as usual. I don't regret it because I feel much better than if I just had stayed on bed longer trying to force myself to sleep just to meet the nightly quota. The reflexes will come after lunch, but today is a calmer day, I have no appointment in the evening so I might be able to read even more Georgian. I might read the round number of 1500 pages so it will be much easier to plan ahead for the remaining one thousand.
Today's Estonian lesson is about the genitive plural, formed from the partitive. Quite tricky, but not so. The book introduces several 'groups' of declensions but I think with input you can get quite a feeling for what alternates within a noun and which ones end in -te or -de etc. Also, there is always the online declension manager in case of doubt :P Sometimes I know all the words in a Russian sentence but I still can't grasp the meaning. It seems some words are missing (and no, I'm not refering to the copula in the present tense :P). It seems word order does play an important role sometimes, and so do some particles that are often left untranslated into English. It turns out 'Herr alle Dinge" talks about psychometry. I could have never imagined it. Looking forward to reading about it in fiction =D All of a sudden, it has become such a good reading...Today was particularly easier, by the way. I'm starting to get the hang of German. At the Goethe exercises I came accross "Красить в зеленый цвет". What an etymological mess! Красиво means beautiful but originally it was красный which turned out to mean red, and then красить means 'to paint' which is also color-related. (Correct me if I'm wrong, etymologists). Finished the light comedy film "Otto der Ausserfriesisch". I ended up understanding more from the story than I was expecting, but less German than I was expecting. I'm not really worried though, I believe I'm starting to see more progress with German listening, and more consistent than those with Norwegian, given German less complex phonology. Futurama was also easy today. Almost no video pauses made as I looked a few words up. Kuxnya was useful too, I'm able to grasp more and more from it. The whole day was a very pleasant journey of studies. I don't remember writing so much on a Friday in the past months, maybe years. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 270 of 364 11 August 2015 at 12:28am | IP Logged |
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I have important news about the weekend. First, the Polyglot Club meeting. We're still trying to promote the gathering. This time 10 people came. Most of the time English was spoken (only a Dutch guy being allowed to speak Portuguese, as he was the only foreigner). Spanish was also spoken a lot of time, though I tried not to, as I'm not actively learning it. I spoke mostly English, too, as we debated important ISSUES related to language learning, such as methods, what is fluency etc. I talked quite a bit. I also spoke Papiamento briefly, Esperanto even less, French and made an attempt at Italian which was regarded as satisfactory, so it seems I really speak Italian. Only my French was worse than I expected. I thought I'd be
Thanks to extensive reading, I got 30 pages in Russian and 29 in Georgian this weekend! Why more Russian than Georgian, if my goal is to catch up with Georgian in the SC, with still almost 1000 pages before the hlf challenge goal? Well, I'm looking forward to finishing one novel in Russian. Also, I've been reading a lot in Georgian the whole week, with at least 5 pages in the evening from Wednesday on. As a result, I reached 76 pages last week (mon-sun)! This is more than the 60 I was counting I'd need for reaching my half-challenge goal. So, maybe if I keep the figure I can reach a number that will allow me to get back to just reading the average number during the week and not worry so much during weekends. I still don't understand much from the native novel I'm reading, though sometimes I do understand some portions crystal clear. I'm expecting to see some improvement, if only thanks to all the other extensive listening I'm doing during the day and Kuxnya with subtitles. I'm thrilled to see where my Georgian is going, maybe I will have reasons to celebrate! I picked the newest Paulo Coelho's novel, Adultério, in Georgian and I figured I can follow it just fine extensively, at my highest comprehension ratio ever. So, that's going to be my next one after this native one. One more reason I want to finish the latter asap. I'll keep you guys updated, i'm really excited about all this now! ================================ Just looked up the number of lessons at the Estonian textbook in Russian. There are 40 of them, and I'm currently at lesson 40. So, I'm likely to finish it in mid September. The good news is that the lessons and the texts don't get any longer, so my learning is sustainable, it's not like I'm going to be overwhelmed by grammar and vocabulary in the next days. The course I hadto do for work is over (more time for languages!!). It was about Knowledge Management, quite interesting. These courses are offered by the Brazilian Senate at the Saberes platform. Although most of the themes are specific to public administration and law, there are quite a few that would make a good MOOC for Portuguese learners, Politics, International Relations, Orthography, Team Management and others. I started watching the videos from Easy Russian. They're not many, only 11, but life is too short to let go of the chance of watching videos in L2 with double subtitles, especially Russian, for which it is so tricky to get subtitles to native videos. When it comes to my extensive listening activities, I had a hard time with Norwegian today. As much as I tried to focus, I could hardly understand anything, just isolated typical sentences. So my attention would drift away quite often. I tried with Georgian and I understood a little more, but still far from being able to follow the story. I wonder if I'm not a bit too tired from so many activities. Started a new German film - 1 1/2 Ritter - Auf der Suche nach der hinreißenden Herzelinde, with Til Schweger. Seems better than the film Otto. I even have another audio channel in Russian, which I won't be using because it's a native German film after all. The subtitles aren't sync'ed properly, so I'll have to go on deleting from the txt file. No big deal really. I could understand much from the dialogues even with no subs, it seems. The speech is clear. At least with Futurama it's getting better. I had to look up few words, almost no pauses and I started to understand some dialogues without looking at the subtitles. Noticing a considerable number of Russian loans, especially when referring to building names such as ostanovka, poyezd vokzali, cherkov, kinoteatr, zavod. It was a short lesson, by the way. No risk of burnout and enough time left. The Perfectionnement Italien lesson was a breeze. Assimil teaches a good deal of idioms, and it's fun to compare them with the French ones, which I sometimes don't understand. Sometimes the Italian one reminds me of Portuguese while the French one is the odd one. What an eventful Kuxnya episode! Good Georgian practice, too. I understood quite a lot. There was a time I had to pause and when I resumed it I had to search for where I had stopped at the txt file with the subtitles, and until I found it I could follow a whole dialogue and understand everything. To think I have already almost 40 Kuxnya episodes, and I almost never got the time to watch any before. I'm getting adjusted to the new forum's routine also, tuning in selective perception. The fact I can remain logged in in most of my devices helps a lot to make use of hidden moments for this purpose and so be a little less busy during study time. I thought I'd have plenty of time for writing since the other tasks were being completed earlier, but still not today. I got really busy in the last half hour. Better luck tomorrow. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 271 of 364 11 August 2015 at 11:41pm | IP Logged |
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It's interesting how everytime I read about genitive and partitive in either Russian or Estonian I just think of French, I imagine there would be a 'de' there so that's why the negation uses the genitive (Il n'y a pas de savon). Same goes for partitive and the partivive article in French: Donnez-moi des livres = partitive plural case in Estonian; Donnez-moi les livres = nominative plural case in Estonian. It's impressive how the usage of the partitive plural coincides with the French partitive: ''beaucoup de livres' also asks for the partitive in Estonian. That's one of the benefits of learning multiple languages :) Today's lesson text was a dialogue, which means different and useful practice.
Ça fait longtemps que je n'écris plus en français ici. À vrai dire, je reste toujours un peu déçu de ne pas avoir réussi à m'exprimer en français aussi aisément que je l'espérais samedi dernier. Il y a quelques semaines, j'ai écrit au sujet de mes études journaliers de langues entièrement en français. Je crois que ça m'a beaucoup aidé et c'est pourquoi j'ai décidé de reprendre ça. Maintenant je vais dire quelques mots sur mon apprentissage du chinois. Je suis toujours en train de lire le livre "Anges et démons" de Dan Brown en chinois, au rythme de trois pages par jour. Ça ne semble pas beaucoup, mais le chinois est difficile, je l'avoue. Ces derniers jours j'ai eu un peu marre de ce livre, le vocabulaire n'est pas si facile comme on s'attendait d'une traduction d'un ouvrage écrit d'abord en langue anglaise et la succession de mauvais évènements qui ne semblaient pas se diriger vers un bout me rendait impatient. Heureusement que les choses sont devenues plus intéressantes maintenant. Aujourd'hui j'ai réussi à lire avec un peu plus d'attention que d'habitude, ce qui est mieux pour ma pratique du chinois. Det gikk bedre med norsk i dag. Jeg klarte å se på serien Karl & Co. for 10 minuter og forstod mye. Ikke alt, må jeg innrømme, men nok til å innse at den var morsom. Det er mye hardere å konsentrere når det ikke finnes undertekster på en video. Som regel, begynner jeg å lese andre sider på nettet når jeg ikke forstår serien godt nok. I dag motsto jeg denne impulsen og sa og hørte nesten alt som foregikk i serien. Jeg har øvdt hardt i de siste dagene for å fa norsken min til å nå en nivå som skal tillate meg til å se på filmer eller serier uten problemer, og jeg ser frem til å oppfatte betydelige resultater i de kommendene månedene. There is an issue I had already discussed here: some languages don't allow for a type of complex subordinate clauses where subjects are different. I've seen this happen with Georgian and Estonian and, as of today, Russian. Let's see the example: English: How old do you think I am? Portuguese:^Quantos anos você acha que eu tenho? (or, idiomatically, 'Quantos anos você me dá' (How many years do you give me), to which one can give an obtuse answer 'Not many, you seem to already have enough of them, jokingly). In Georgian, Estonian and Russian there have two be two distinct sentences, the latter being an aposition to the former, i.e. you can only ask "What do you think, how old am I?": Russian: Как Вы думаете, сколько мне лет? Estonian: Mis te arvate, kui vana ma olen? Georgian: როგორ ფიქრობთ, რამდენი წლის ვარ? I don't know how it works in other neither-Romance-nor-Germanic languages and whether this phenomenon has a name, but I find it interesting and important to keep in mind if you are learning farther languages. I had been on a good mood for reading Russian in the past weeks, but today I found the book harder. Don't really know why, it somehow 'unclicked'. Maybe when I try harder at previous subjects I become a little more tired at this time. It doesn't help the fact I had to stop several times after I started reading from Allegiant. I didn't know there was a cogante to 'queijo' in Italian. It's 'cacio'. So far I only knew about formaggio. I read about cacio at today's Assimil lesson, and about the idiom 'capitare come il cacio sui macheroni'. Assimil, how on Earth can 'Paco Ramirez' be a Brazilian name? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Anya Pentaglot Senior Member France Joined 5791 days ago 636 posts - 708 votes Speaks: Russian*, FrenchC1, English, Italian, Spanish Studies: German, Japanese, Hungarian, Sanskrit, Portuguese, Turkish, Mandarin Studies: Ancient Greek, Hindi | Message 272 of 364 12 August 2015 at 9:13pm | IP Logged |
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In Russian, if you want to avoid answering the question "Cколько вам лет?" (How old are you?), one can say "A
cколько дадите?" (How many years do you give me?). 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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