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Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 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 3329 of 3959 26 July 2013 at 11:44am | IP Logged | ||
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SP: Ayer por la tarde me ia corriendo alrededor los canales de television para encontrar algo que mirar que no sea en inglés, y casi por casualidad acabé en TVE donde havia un programa especial sobre el grave accidente ferroviario que tuvo lugar fuera de Santiago de Compostela. Y he todo visto hasta la fin, no solo debido a la gravidad del incidente, peró tambien porque era una ocasión excelente para oír un poco de español sin la fea musica de fondo habitual. En principio se habla gallego en Galicia, peró he solo visto la palabra "Urxensias" sopra la entrada de un hospital - todo el resto fue en español. Peró a veces se necesita también oír un poco de español...
I watched TVE in Spanish for several hours yesterday. There has been a terrible accident with one of their fast trains, which apparently thundered ahead through a curve with 190 km/h, more than twice the permitted speed - and now the question is why it did so. In addition to being serious business in all senses of the word, this program was also an excellent listening exercise because the usual nauseating background noise pollution ('music') was dropped. In addition to that I studied an article about the Finnish language from the Indonesian Wikipedia and another about computer viruses in Modern Greek (obviously not any old kind of Greek with this subject). In both cases I got some quite relevant vocabulary which my dictionaries couldn't give me, like the word in Bahasa Indonesia for adjectives. Actually it is debatable whether Indonesian can be said to have adjectives in the strict sense - the words that make do as adjectives can also function like verbs, and they mostly come as predicatives or in syntagmas initiated by the connector word "yang". And reading about a language which hovers between the flective and the agglutinative languages like Finnish in a language that has next to no morphology is quite interesting. In Greek the word for a virus is almost as small as the thing itself: "ιός". And computer vira are of course called "ιοί υπολογιστών". Besides I did a lesson more in my Polish Mówimo, this time the account of a fictive episode at a railway station, "dworzec" (derived from the same word that gave the word for a stately mansion, "dwór"). The word for "stacja" also exists, but I'm not quite sure where you should use one or the other of these two. I do however remember that the main station of Gdansk was called "Dworzec główny" or "Gdansk główny", whereas the one in Warszczawa only was called "Centralna" (and it was not as imposing as the one in Gdansk, which may be the reason why "dworzec" wasn't used). Edited by Iversen on 26 July 2013 at 11:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4704 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 3330 of 3959 26 July 2013 at 12:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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On the train stacja was used in Poland when I
passed through. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 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 3331 of 3959 29 July 2013 at 1:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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I did the obvious: check Wikipedia. The Polish Wikipedia has got an article about "Stacja kolejowa" and another about "Dworzec kolejowy". The one about "stacja" is fairly short and it has just one picture from a detail of the roof at the Antwerpen station. The one about dworzec is long and full of cultural information, which is totally absent from the one about 'stacja' -including a picture of "Dworzec Wroclaw glówny". I still don't have a precise definition, but it looks like the word "dworzec" is the one that evokes the most vivid reactions in Poland itself whereas stacja seems to be a bland loanword with more or less the same factual meaning.
Apart from that: I spent last evening trying to write an article in Danish with a middle section where I gradually applies one feature after the other of Irish syntax on the Danish language, beginning with the initial verb and final subject, over the extended use of verbal nouns and lack of an indefinite article to the use of inflected prepositions and things like lenition and eclipse. The resultat is of course quite weird, and I'm not sure whether the redaction of the magazine of my travellers' club will accept it - otherwise I'll just have to publish it at the homepage. Wouldbe it in English at-looking at somewhat like this, and wouldbecome the text from there ever stranger as added I elements more toit. Edited by Iversen on 29 July 2013 at 1:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 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 3332 of 3959 30 July 2013 at 10:26am | IP Logged | ||
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Yesterday evening I went through a sequence of four languages: Polish with Mówimu, Russisk with my old history book (the chapter about the oprichnina (Опричнина) of Iwan Grozny), Indonesian with an article about the Bird park on Bali and finally some excerpts in Greek from a forum or blog where a Greek MC driver called for companions to a trip through Italy and Spain.
Besides I watched the final program in a History Channel series about Croatian kings. The History Channel is commendable because it often has programs in non-English languages, and this one was mostly in Croatian. However somebody had forgotten to turn on the subtitles so it became an exercise in catching a word here and there and trying to piece a general meaning together. Not the way I normally learn languages, but welcome as a 'survival test' in a language which I haven't studied systymatically, but to some extent can understand through Russian (and now also Polish). When I get to the stage where I am ready to add a Southern Slavic language to my list Croatian is certainly among the candidates, but I would prefer one of those languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet, that is: Bulgarian, Macedonian or Serbian. So far I can only say that I'm slightly amazed at the speed with which I learn Polish right now - it seemed to be quite hard when I tried it the first time a few years ago, and I put it back on the shelf less than a year ago after a short attempt to read some of my old texts from round one, but this time it seems like a good old friend which just has been absent for a couple of years. Edited by Iversen on 30 July 2013 at 10:38am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| mahasiswa Pentaglot Groupie Canada Joined 4429 days ago 91 posts - 142 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Malay Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Persian, Russian, Turkish, Mandarin, Hindi | Message 3333 of 3959 30 July 2013 at 3:26pm | IP Logged | ||
It's because your Russian has improved since then, no? I'm hoping for the same. I haven't looked at Polish yet but I found a tutor this summer, I was really tempted. But I ought to nail down the case system and verbs in Russian before moving on I told myself. My accent is great, I think, because I started with audio tapes and then switched into Assimil, but because I can't get my inflections correct, for my interlocutors, every sentence of mine is their Frankenstein! Edited by mahasiswa on 30 July 2013 at 3:27pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 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 3334 of 3959 31 July 2013 at 10:44am | IP Logged | ||
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My problem in Russian isn't really the grammar (although I still commit too many idiotic errors). I have more or less solved that problem by making "green sheets" with an overview over the things I really need to know from the morphology and certain syntactical items: one sheet for the combined morphology of regular adjectives and nouns (having them on separate sheets og pages as in the grammars is no good), another sheet with an overview of the present tense of the verbs (based on an analysis of forty seven or so paradigms listed in an appendix in one of my dictionaries), a third sheet with all the pronouns, a fourth with all prepositions and the cases they govern and a number of white pages with other overviews, like the one I made over the use of imperfective and perfective verbs in subordinate clauses and after other verbs - it has still not been converted into an authoritative green sheet.
The big problem for me in Russian is that I haven't solved the problem of finding a reliable source with lots of documentaries about science or history to listen to while I work on my computer or sit in my armchair doing something else. It might be feasible if I could stand literature (where the Russian language of course is extremely well represented), but I get positively sick if I have to deal with those long and boring soulsearching novels about the fate of unsavoury fictional people which I can get as both audio and text, and apart from GLOSS the sources with documentaries I have found on the internet generally are without subtitles or translations. At my present listening level it could in principle also be subtitles in Russian, but spoken Russian is still just a tiny bit too opaque to me to be pleasant to listen to in the long run while doing other things if I can' get that extra bit of help. I have to concentrate hard when I listen, and then I get bored and drift into other activities, like reading Russian nonfiction with or without a translation (the history book I mentioned has accents, but it is monolingual) - I can read that stuff without feeling that I am drowning. OK, enough whining. The funny thing is that this situation hasn't changed since last time I attempted to learn Polish (and more or less gave it up because it would take more time than I could afford). The big difference in my opinion is the tour-de-force of making wordlists with several thousand Russian words earlier this year (after a similar exercise with Modern Greek in January during my holiday in Cuba). This means that I now get far more words for free than I got last year, and it is also the reason that I could get anything at all out of a TV program in Croatian without subtitles. Edited by Iversen on 31 July 2013 at 1:06pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 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 3335 of 3959 03 August 2013 at 12:20am | IP Logged | ||
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IC: Ég hef gert venjulega hluti á pólsku, rússnesku, indónesísku, írsku og latinu síðustu 2-3 kvöld, en fyrir utan það hef ég byrjað að skrifa orðaskrár á íslensku. Ogþað kom að mér að þekking á dönsku gef rangar öryggi - raunin er sú að það eru hellingur af 'fölskum vinum' (false friends). Til dæmis þýðir "afkoma" 'profit' á dönsku og ensku eða 'præstation' (performance'), en danska 'afkom' (descendants) er "afkvæmi" á islendsku ... og svo er það alla leið í gegnum stafrófið, og nú hef ég sett smá meira til í íslenskum orðaforða mínum.
The last couple of evenings I have added Icelandic to my repertoire of daily acitvities - I felt that my skills in that language were slipping away. And now where I do something about it I have noticed how often my Danish background lead me astray - there are simply tons of false friends between Danish and Icelandic. But often it is understandable how the difference in mening came about. For instance the noun "afkoma" means profit or performance - i.e. the thing that comes out of your activity. But there is another word "afkvæmi" which is translated to "afkom" in Danish (= descendants), and offspring is clearly also something that comes from the activites of the old folks in the family (vaguely related to the Danish word "udkomme", which means the money or goods you earn from you work). And unlikely as it may seem, "kvæmi" is also based on the root "koma" - notice New Norwegian "kvam" (came). If I saw these words in texts and didn't have a dictionary it would take some time to grasp their real meanings, but luckily there are things known as dictionaries on this planet. Edited by Iversen on 05 August 2013 at 9:50am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6700 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 3336 of 3959 07 August 2013 at 12:21am | IP Logged | ||
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IT: In questo momento sto guardando Passaggio al Nordoeste con tralle altre cose una visita alla Roma antica dove una visita al gabinetto era un atto sociale.. Infatto fa tempo che ci fosse qualcosa da vedere affatto su Raiuno, ma devono sicuramente essere applauditi quando a rare volte riescono a loro di non essere imbarazzanti e noiosi.
SP: Antes de esto he visto un programa con españoles en el extranjero en TVE - esta vez de Túnez. IR: Thosaigh mé ag déanamh staidéir ar an téacs i nGaeilge, ach chaith sé ar shiúl le déistin nuair a fuair mé amach go raibh sé aistriúchán meaisín ó Bhéarla: "Feidmónn: 4-6 daoine. Déanann an refreshing, blas cumhra bergamot an cleanser ....". Ba mhaith liom a thaitin go tar éis foghlaim conas a dhéanamh sorbet i nGaeilge, ach dheann se Irish.zenews.co.uk calaois orm roimhe seo le teidil mhealla agus ábhar lofa. Ithe teagmhasach fiú Dumbledore líomóid sorbet, nuair a bhíonn sé sa Muggle-thalamh. PO: Mam również studiowałam teksty z mojego polskiego podręcznika. AF: Ek het ook tyd gehad het om sommige tekste in Afrikaans uit rsg.co.za te studeer, en dit het my daaraan herinner dat Afrikaans het 'n verstommende kwantiteit van Garpe-genitive: "Die vryskutkamaraman (..) sê dit was nie sy bedoeling om Madiba se privaatheid te skend (...) nie. Human is in hegtenis geneem nadat hy 'n klein radiobeheerde vlieënde kamera oor die hospitaal laag vlieg het." Het spijt me, maar hoe kan dit enigiets anders wees as 'n poging om Mandela se lewe te skend in sy miskien laaste uur? Damn paparazzi! Edited by Iversen on 07 August 2013 at 12:40am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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