joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5470 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German
| Message 33 of 68 29 March 2011 at 6:50pm | IP Logged |
This show sounds really difficult to understand, if people really do try to shout each other down. I'm impressed
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Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5556 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona
| Message 34 of 68 29 March 2011 at 9:24pm | IP Logged |
One mistake per line on average is really good. That's probably close to 90% accuracy and around mid-B2 level vocabulary, if I had to venture a guess. Did you do this without a dictionary or grammar/spelling checker as well?
If I can write as good as you later on this year, I'm celebrating - really! Spasibo for sharing your essay, it gives me a better idea of what I can strive for. :)
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Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5334 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian
| Message 35 of 68 02 April 2011 at 9:28pm | IP Logged |
Looks like you are doing great, I agree with Teango, one mistake per line is actually a victory!
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petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5086 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map
| Message 36 of 68 05 April 2011 at 11:45pm | IP Logged |
joanthemaid wrote:
This show sounds really difficult to understand, if people really do try to shout each other down. |
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Yeah, it is. I don't pretend I understand it all. When they start arguing, there's no way to figure out individual threads of speech.
Teango wrote:
Did you do this without a dictionary or grammar/spelling checker as well? |
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I use spell checker. I also use a dictionary from time to time, for words that I have never used before. Or I might google my guess and see if I can find something similar that sounds like what I need. But these are all too time consuming, so I use them only when I can't come up with a way around what I want to say.
Thank you all for kind words!
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petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5086 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map
| Message 37 of 68 06 April 2011 at 12:19am | IP Logged |
I have one more image for you. This time it's a graph of my progress as measured by number of words that I (supposedly) know. That steep part around August 2010 is my trip to Petersburg. You can also see that I was less active lately, which reflects reality ;)
To explain how I came up with this, I have to explain a couple things about my toolset.
It's all built around Anki, obviously. Since Anki decks are really just SQLite databases, it's easy to open them and do arbitrary SQL magic over them. So I have a tool written in Python that lists all the fields and find those that contain only single word. Then I have a list of top 32K words that I downloaded somewhere on the Internet. The words are listed in canonical form, that is infinitive for verbs, singular nominative for nouns, etc. The tool does an intersection of those two sets. The theory is that this filters out words in L1, inflected forms that would lead to duplication, and only counts words for which I have a dedicated fact. That obviously worked fine while I was drilling core vocabulary, and works not so fine now that I add more sentences. But it's still useful enough.
Every time I finish work with my deck, I run the tool and it makes a contribution to the list of timestamps and word counts. I then use another tool, written in Python using matplotlib and pylab, that takes these data and renders them in the form that you see.
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petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5086 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map
| Message 38 of 68 17 April 2011 at 7:59pm | IP Logged |
I just finished reading Tolkien's The Hobbit. I was parallel reading the original and a translation to Russian by К. Королёв (this one). I started reading this book (or, rather, these books) about a year ago, I think, but put them aside for a long time. The reason was mainly that the translation is rather poor and not at all suitable for parallel reading.
For example in English, Gandalf says to Mr. Baggins: "My pardon. I give it to you. In fact, I will go so far as to send you to this adventure". Meanwhile the translation goes "... прощения. Так вот, я тебе его и дарую. Скажу откровенно, я забрел в этакую даль только ради тебя. Пойдём со мной". Have you noticed how the translator took the sentence "I will go so far as..." literally?
Much later on, when Mr. Baggins parts with the Arkenstone, it's "not without a shudder, not without a glance of longing", but "без всякого сожаления". There are many such blunders. It's as if the translator first read each paragraph, and then re-narrated it in his own words, from memory, occasionally misunderstanding the original. I don't much mind that the translation is non-strict (e.g. the paragraphs don't always match, which would be a let-down for parallel reading in itself), but I do mind that it changes meaning.
(Edited the URL.)
Edited by petrklic on 17 April 2011 at 8:02pm
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joanthemaid Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5470 days ago 483 posts - 559 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Russian, German
| Message 39 of 68 28 April 2011 at 11:15pm | IP Logged |
Wouldn't it make more sense to do parallel reading on originally Russian books? Then it wouldn't matter somuch if the translation is bad, as long as it helps you understand the original...
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petrklic Triglot Pro Member Czech Republic Joined 5086 days ago 95 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, Russian Studies: Vietnamese Personal Language Map
| Message 40 of 68 01 May 2011 at 1:55pm | IP Logged |
joanthemaid wrote:
Wouldn't it make more sense to do parallel reading on originally Russian books? Then it wouldn't matter somuch if the translation is bad, as long as it helps you understand the original... |
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I'm not sure it would help that much. If the translation contains the kind of errors that I mentioned, then it doesn't matter which direction the translation goes. You are right, of course, that reading original Russian and only using L1 as a crutch makes more sense.
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