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Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5186 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 3777 of 3959 19 December 2014 at 3:18am | IP Logged | ||
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Merci pour ce petit texte car c'est la première fois que je lis quelque-chôse en occitan et cela m'intéresse pas mal. Maintenant j'ai envie de retrouver «L'occitan sans peine» que j'ai sauvegardé en format pdf quelque-part par ici.
À propos de tes liens... «Lo Congrès» semble malheureusement être hors-ligne en ce moment, et sur Novello.com je trouve seulement le site d'un restaurant québecois. En tout cas, la page de Lexilogos fonctionne, alors j'ai au moins découvert un bon point de départ pour de futurs recherches. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4636 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 3778 of 3959 19 December 2014 at 9:33am | IP Logged | ||
Apart from the name, there is not much in common between the Soviet-time Komsomol and today's newspaper, although it is a direct continuation of the old paper. However, as from 1 December 1990 it became privatised and turned into a tabloid. Today it is the most-selling daily newspaper in Russia, and what you bought must be the European weekly aimed at the Russian diaspora. They also have a website which I look to regularly to find things to read in Russian. 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 3779 of 3959 19 December 2014 at 10:01am | IP Logged | ||
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The link in my latest message definitely shouldn't go to a Canadian restaurant, but to the page www.nouvello.com, "Nouvello dou Prouvenço".
I found Lo Congrès through Lexilogos, but when I wanted to give a link I had trouble because the address in the address field didn't function when I placed it between the usual tags in HTLAL (HTLAL didn't like the tag parentheses). Below I have quoted a direct copy without tags to illustrate the problem. However if you pass through Lexilogos you can jump to several Occitan dictionaries including Lo Congres. And once you are inside its homepage, you can navigate to other parts of it through the links at the top. For instance you can read the 'actualitats' here. http://www.locongres.org/index.php?dic[0]=1&dic2[0]=1&dic2[1]=2&dic2[2]=5&dic2[3]=6&dic2[4]=7&dic2[5] =8&q=dictionnaire&type=begin&task=search&submit_fr=search&sl ang=lang_fr&Itemid=259&option=com_dicodoc&lang=oc By the way, I have just found out that there are machine translation possibilities for Occitan - though for once not through the wellknown "traduttore tradittore" Google Translate. In fact, the Catalan Generalitat has come up with a program that can translate between Catalan, 'Spanish', Occitan and the dialect of the Aran Valley (!!). I have tried a few sentences, and to my amazement it seems to hate the n-part of a negation, which I was absolute certain to have seen in genuine texts: "Jo no crec que sigui possible" (Catalan) --> "Ieu cresi pas que siá possible" (Occitan). But it may be right - when I looked for no's with Google they were more common in old texts, so it could simply be that Modern Occitan has evolved even faster than Modern French in this respect. And I have read more old stuff than new stuff in this language - like the text of the famous song by the celebrated trobairitz (female troubadour) Condesa de Dia: "A Chantar M'er de So Q'ieu no Voldria" (I have to sing about the things I didn't want). Given my lack of feeling with contemporary developments I can't vouch for the superior trustworthiness of this translator, but it seems to be at least as trustworthy as Google translate. As for the Russian newspapers I have indeed bought the weekly international edition of the Komsomolska. The 7-11 at the railway station seems to have two Russian newspapers for sale on an on-off basis because I have one earlier bought another Russian newspaper there - but I don't remember its name. Edited by Iversen on 19 December 2014 at 11:00am 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 3780 of 3959 20 December 2014 at 12:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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The ever rising number of readers of this thread is still a source of profound bewilderment to me - in fact so much that the idea of a bot out there somewhere has passed through my mind, but I just can't see the purpose.
I have noted down some visitor numbers: Dec 18 at 21:15: 3.246.331 -- Dec 20 at 10:16: 3.296.684. That makes some 23.000 visitors in 1½ day - and rising. How can that be? It seems that my humble effusions have gone viral, but I can't even see any connection to the things I write about - nor whether I have written recently or not. And there are still people who subscribe to my Youtube channel even though I haven't made a video since Budapest 2013. That is even more a mystery to me. But in case there are a few real humans among those who read these lines it might be time to revert to some central notions about wordlists. And now all the old readers cringe because I have written so much about those lists (including the basic descriptions in my "Guide to learning languages" part 4 and a Wikia article) - but some of all those daily readers may not have read those sources, so pleeeze have patience with me just for one day. The following message will be purely didactical. And sorry, it'll be in English - our common koine. I have two main sources for my wordlists: intensively studied texts and dictionaries. There should be a third, namely words jotted down from extensively read texts and audio, but there are simply not enough new words from these sources to warrant a special treatment. Which may explain that my B2 and C1 vocabularies seem to stagnate once they pass the 20.000 head word mark and I stop making wordlists. When I word intensively with texts I do so on folded A4 sheets (more handy than unfolded sheets), and I reserve a right margin of about 5 cm for new words. Sometimes I just guess the meaning, sometimes it comes from the translation part in a bilingual printout and sometimes I look a word up. So the 'data quality' may be suspect, but I check things properly when I do the wordlist so it doesn't matter. With dictionaries I typically choose a random page a transfer some, but not all of the words directly to a wordlist. In some cases I have initiated a campaign where I go through the whole dictionary from A to Z (or alpha to gamma, or whatever) - like I did with Serbian this year in preparation for Novi Sad. And I can feel a very clear effect of such campaigns - I may have worked with a language on an unsystematic base for years, but the progress I experience after a campaign that gives me thousands of new words in a short time is in a totally different class. And for the passive skills the vocabulary size is allimportant - but not automatically for the active skills, where you do need a decent background vocabulary, but the decisive factor is your training in using a limited number of very common words and phrases. Wordlists give a large background vocabulary, but it mostly consists of of rare words so you have to do something different to learn and train the common ones. So what is a wordlist à la me? Well, there is a first phase, where the original three-column wordlist is written, and the format of this wordlist has not changed much since I designed it in early 2007. And then there are the repetition rounds, where I have experimented a lot. I have normally just done one repetition one day after the main event. The rationale behind this is that I found in 2007 that I remembered more or less the same number of words after round 3 or 4 as after round 2. LAtely I have however come to doubt the wisdom of this, because I discovered during the analysis of my Serbian campaign that the words I remembered or had forgotten in each repetition round weren't the same. Somehow I ended up with around 20% forgotten words in every round, but less than half the words in each round where the same as in the preceding round. Since then I have done 2. or even 3. rounds, though not as systematically as round 1, which is absolutely crucial the the learning process. So I fold a sheet of paper and divide it into three vertical sections, each of which is supposed to contain three columns. With my small handwriting I can fit around 30 words in each column, but people with larger handwritings may have to divide the sheet into just two sections, each with three columns. I have experimented with a layout where I made four sections: two for the main wordlist (with three internal columns each) and two for the first repetition round (with just two internal columns), mainly because I otherwise might throw the original wordlist away without thinking about it before I had made a repetition round. But now I prefer the extra space with just three sections, and I have learned to keep better track of my main wordlists. The three columns of a wordlist contain words in 1) the target language, 2) a translation, 3) the original word. Very short word combinations can be integrated in the layout (maybe by doing a word wrap), but the layout is not suited to longer phrases. Some indications of morphology can be included, but only the barest minimum. For instance I sometimes write the characteristic consonant of the aorist with Greek verbs, and I sometimes indicate the gender of a substantive if there are several possibilities. But adding too much information would make it harder to remember the word itself, and there isn't space for a long text. For the same reason only the central meanings should be indicated - not every derived meaning you might find in real life. If you want to remember a certain (short) expression then give it its own line. And finally the most important advice: learn the words in groups of 5 to 7 words. Why? because you don't learn much just by repeating a word in your head. Think of something else to break the repetition, and then return to the word - that's where long term learning occurs. And running through a sequence of words that is just difficult and long enough to strain, but not tire out your memory is an excellent way of doing this. There is one thing more to the method which you can't see in the layout, namely the memorization (or rememorization) that takes place between each column. And it can't be shown because basically every memorization trick you can imagine can be used. I personally use a combination of 'linguistic' memory hooks (like similarity to known words in the same or another language), free associations (typically based on associations to the sound of the beginning of the word - associations to whole words are more tricky to find) and images or memories (for instance associations about the place where I saw the word first time). Even raw repetition is permitted in sensible doses. OK, you have copied 5-7 words in the target language to the first column in a section. Now read them through and think a suitable translation for each word. At this stage you will typically be using the translations in the source (the right margin in my 'intensive' layout or the translations in the dictionary), but there is ample time to check dubious translations in the source - and even to add words that might be relevant, like the other half of a perfective-imperfect verb pair in the Slavic languages. Or the root word in Indonesian. When you are sure that you have a translation ready for each word you write it in the second column. Now do the same thing in the opposite direction, from translation back to the original target word. When you are sure you can do that for each and every word in the group (using every memorization trick you can imagine) you cover up the first column and write the third column. If against all odds you have forgotten something then do have a peek in the source, but don't write the solution right away - postpone writing it till the last possible moment or take it with the next group. Otherwise you won't have strained your memory, and it is the straining that gives results - just as with sports. The result would look like this in its three phases - please note the use of two different colours to separate the columns: phase one: target1 .. .. target2 .. .. target3 .. .. target4 .. .. target5 .. .. target6 .. .. phase two: target1 base1 .. target2 base2 .. target3 base3 .. target4 base4 .. target5 base5 .. target6 base6 .. phase three: (covered) base1 target1 | (covered) base2 target2 | (covered) base3 target3 | (covered) base4 target4 | (covered) base5 target5 | (covered) base6 target6 | OK, that was the main wordlist. There are several ways to do repetitions. One way is to return to the original intensively studied text for wordlists based on texts. If you read the text slowly through while checking that you now know the meaning of each an every word, then that is undeniably a repetition. But it demands a large amount of selfrestraint because you will be tempted just to rush through the text and declare that the test has been absolved with success. FOr that reason I prefer doing repetition rounds on paper, and there are (at least) two ways of doing it (short of doing the original word list again or transferring the words to Anki, which absolutely makes sense - for those who use Anki). The most elaborate, but also most timeconsuming way to do repetitions is to copy 5-7 translations (not necessarily using the same division lines as with the original list) to column one out of two on a blank sheet of paper (with or without subdivisions across the page). Read them carefully and make sure that you know the original word in the target large for each and every of them - and then write those words in the second column. This actually corresponds to doing column 2 and 3 in the original layout, but now you have the original wordlist as your source, and you are supposed to know the words. If you have forgotten most of the words then you should improve your memorization techniques because that's where you may have taking a short cut. An average of somewhere between 70 and 90% of the words remembered is OK, everything below that calls for some kind of rethinking your memorization techniques. It should look something like this: base1 target1 base2 target2 base3 target3 base4 target4 base5 target5 base6 target6 base7 target7 base8 target8 ... A faster method - which I have used during my A-to-Z campaigns to save time and to make easy statistics - is to copy the target language words one by one to a clean sheet. To make sure you do remember the meaning of the words you uncover the translation column in the original wordlist gradually so that you don't read the translation to a given foreign word before you have tried to recall its meaning. If you have a hypothesis and it is confirmed then it is OK, but otherwise you add a remark to the foreign word on your repetition sheet. It should look something like this: target1 target2 target3 base3 target4 ... This second method does give you the opportunity to calculate statistics, but otherwise it obviously poses less strain on your memory and therefore it may be less efficient. So in this case it would be even more relevant to do a second repetition round - preferably several days later. The choice between the two methods also depends on your degree of ease with the language - with a strong language you can allow yourself more slack. I don't use Anki (or similar systems), but in theory Anki would be a logical way of doing your repetitions. The trouble is of course that I write my lists by hand because I feel that I have more 'contact' when I write them myself instead of just copying them into some gadget. For newer generations who have developed a symbiotic relationship with their keyboard that may be the way to go, and then it would obviously be easier to somehow parse the original wordlist and put it into Anki as single words or expressions. But so far I stick to my paper sheets and ballpoint pens in different colours. Edited by Iversen on 21 December 2014 at 3:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4662 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 3781 of 3959 20 December 2014 at 12:02pm | IP Logged | ||
En 2009 le métro toulousain a mis des annonces en occitan, ce qui a fait "bien rire" les jeunes qui faisaient leur trajet : reportage (à noter le monsieur qui se déclare favorable aux annonces (à 0:32) et qui parle avec un accent qui est en quelque sorte un "descendant" de cette langue). On peut trouver aussi des vidéos d'un journal télévisé en occitan qui est sous-titré en français (exemple). :-) Edited by tastyonions on 20 December 2014 at 12:04pm 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 3782 of 3959 20 December 2014 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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FR: J'ai visité Tolosa (Toulouse) 2005, mais evidemment c'était trop tot - je n'ai pas eu le bonheur d'entendre les renseignements du métro toulousain dans la langue traditionelle de cette région, i.e. en Occitan. Mais il y a un cas semblable en Irlande, où les chemins de fer sont parfaitement bilingues.
OC: Gràcias pel lou ligam a l'emission parcialament occitana de França 3.Era una pròva utila de la miá compreneson de la lenga occitana parlada - e visca, comprenguèri gaireben tot! Triomfe! Mas se parlèt en votz nauta e clara - aiçò vòl pas dire o comprendriá quinsevolhe vilatà sens dents. FR: J'ai écouté aussi cette vidéo, où il est affirmé qu'un certain Conseil Constitutionel a déclaré que l'appui au bilinguisme en France selon cette auguste institution serait contre la constitution, - ou en d'autres mots, que la ratification de la charte europénne sur les langues regionales en effet serait contre la constitution. Bon ben, si la repression des languages régionales serait formellement inscrite dans la constitution française en vigueur, il serait peut-être temps de moderniser la constitution. CAT: I ara hi ha català al meu programa. He trobat tot un seguit de vídeos sobre Gaudí dins l'arxiu de TVE Catalunya, i en aquest moment estic escoltant el primer vídeo dela series. Hi ha un violoncel histéric en el fons, però millor això que l'habitual orgue electrònic o cantants sense talent que destrueixen tantes de les emissions de TVE.. Edited by Iversen on 20 December 2014 at 9:07pm 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 3783 of 3959 21 December 2014 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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SP: Estoy escuchando un programma de cocina de TVE en español, perù bubiera podido escuchar mucho más español se no fuera la lamentable música de fondo. A unas 10 horas traté de ver El escarabajo verde, pero cambié el canal debido a una canción pésimo en el fondo - y me olvidé de volver. Después he visto un programa en Aleman en 3SAT(y - de acuerdo con la costumbre alemana - con voces semiapagadas en inglés en el fondo) sobre una de las fuentes de inspiración para Tolkien, a saber el Cantar de los Nibelungos (Nibelungenlied), que ultimamente seria un eco distante de derrota de los burgundos por los hunos. Todo esto es reducido en una comedia de confusión con Siegfried como figura central. Hay una leyenda aparentada, peró mas brutal en los Eddas islandesas donde el heroe se llama Sigurðr Fafnersbani... y como se sabe, Richard Wagner ha también utilizado este complejo de leyendas. He escribido algo sobre esto en 2009.
ER: Видео сам и делове програма из хрватског производњу сира у Хрватској и у холандском Фриесланд - и позадинска музика Хрвата није ни приближно толико досадна као музика Шпанаца, дакле сам погледао на крава и сира за дуго времена. But of course I have also done some paperwork, which included a bit of Greek culture, some Indonesian paleontology and -lo and behold - quite a bit of Irish (for only the second time since spring this year). Back then I left my Irish at a fairly low level, and in such cases the degradation comes swift and without mercy. So to get back into the language I have restudied a short article from December 2006 about a social network called An Líonra Sósialta - originally from a homepage called anlionra.com, but it seems that it has shut down since i downloaded the article. Irish is a funny language, and in earlier study periods I have made hyperliteral translations to get the gist of a text in a language I understood - 'free' translations are worthless for this purpose. So let's have a look at a couple of sentences from the article, together with the Google translate on my printout and my own hyperliteral - I hope - version: In ionad sin, ()* 'sé an aidhm a bhí agam ná bunchúrsa oiliúna a chur ar fáil, Instead of that, () 'it was my intention introduction to provide training, In stead of-that, (was) he the aim to be with-me in-the ground-round (of) training REL** put at oportunity (->at disposal) cuid e phobal an líonra a chur in aithne do mhórphobal na Gaeilge, part of a community network to identify the Irish mainstream, [for] part of community [a] network REL put in acquaintance of big-community/people in Gaelic agus mapa bóthair a sholáthar don té a mbeadh suim aige níos mó a fhoghlaim. and provide a road map for anyone who anyone who would like to learn more. and map of-roads for* provision of whoever REL be wish with-them more more to know. And it continues like that, page up and page down. Actually the machine translation of the passage above isn't too bad - I have seen far worse examples, and the reason is of course that the number of decent bilingual texts available for analysis by Google is far less with a small language like Irish than it is with for instance Spanish or German. At * there must be a verb missing (marked with an apostrophe), which doesn't make things easier. The two "a"s which I have translated with REL function like something like a non-anaphoric relative particle - so using a relative pronoun with a reference here would be misleading. The "a" before "sholáthar" could be the homonymous preposition, but those a's some pesky little fellows which can have all sorts of roles, and I may have misidentified some of them. I have not made Irish wordlists today, but due to the character of this language it is necessary to provide more space for word combinations, because their meaning in Irish is even more likely to be quite unexpected than the meaning of their counterparts in English. But deep down must once upon a time have been a logic, and sometimes you can glimpse it when you have studied a given compound. Let's take the verb "cuir", which means to put or place or - with corpses - bury. For the corresponding nominal form "cur" my Collins gives the translations "sowing, laying, burial, mound". Yes, there is some kind of logic here. But "cur amach" ("amach" = out, forth, aloud) means "vomit", and "cur ar aghaid" (aghaid = front, aspect) is an advancement. Nobody could have guessed those expressions beforehand so they should be learnt as words. And therefore I need more space in my columns in my wordlist with Irish than with most other languages I have studied. Edited by Iversen on 21 December 2014 at 3:11pm 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 3784 of 3959 23 December 2014 at 11:26am | IP Logged | ||
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I have just compared the visitor numbers with those I have written down earlier, and it seems that we are getting back to normal rates. I have no idea why there in a period came so many visitors, but the newcomers may have realized, that this log thread wasn't the treasure trove they had expected, but just a few reflections on things I have been doing to learn a few languages more.
As yesterday, when I found my inflight magazine from Air Serbia in a stash of old papers and started reading it extensively (it is bilingual, so I didn't need a dictionaryý). I also went through most of an article in Greek abut the Russian anarchist Kroptokin, who started life as a prince, but chose to work in Siberia for 5 years and after that converted into a fullfledged politcal bomb. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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