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TAC 2014 - Rare Languages Team Thread | ||
Tags: Nahuatl | Armenian | Team Thread | Sanskrit | Georgian | Indonesian | Rare Languages | Hebrew | Arabic | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6062 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 185 of 223 28 July 2014 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I won't be doing this month's challenge, as I'm studying Sanskrit. Doing the challenge would mean refreshing my Arabic (my Sanskrit is not enough for that) and that would mean making a sharp break, which I don't want to do.
On a related note, I saw a short while ago in the forum a reference to this site: foreigncy.org. It provides tools for reading news articles in quite a number of languages with different alphabets or scripts. For the moment, it has Arabic, Persian, Urdu, Hebrew, Russian and Mandarin. I find it quite interesting. Take a look. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 186 of 223 30 July 2014 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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I found this article rather interesting:
http://olahraga.kompasiana.com/bola/2014/07/27/mesut-zil-tho mas-mller-bastian-schweinsteiger-dan-kawan-kawan-666211.html It's reporting about the World Cup from an Indonesian perspective. Some things I noted:
Edited by Sprachprofi on 30 July 2014 at 4:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4704 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 187 of 223 07 August 2014 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey all -- I'm sorry for disappearing! Currently catching up on everyone's posts, but I'm
glad to see that Team Rare has continued to thrive over these past few months. I'll have an update up on my log today. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6062 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 188 of 223 07 August 2014 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Glad to know you're still with us, Hekje. More important, glad to know you're still learning Indonesian.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6062 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 189 of 223 20 August 2014 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Dear team members, you may have noticed that I haven't proposed a challenge for this month. It's not the first time this happens. It is, however, the first time no one else has complained. :P
Today is the 20th of August, and I believe that by now it's a bit too late to have a proposal for this month. I suggest we leave that for the rentrée in September. In the mean time, I'd like to renew my vows of an excellent summer, full of language interactions. I'd also like to remind you that a cultural presentation is always a valid challenge solution. This goes for those who haven't done it yet, as well as for anyone who wishes to add something. Sometimes, it's difficult: whenever I try to select something for my Sanskrit presentation, I end up surfing the web for hours. :) Edited by Luso on 20 August 2014 at 11:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6062 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 190 of 223 10 September 2014 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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Cultural presentation - Sanskrit:
It's easy to get sidetracked while presenting a rich classical language such as this one. I'll try to avoid this by doing something different. After all, we all know sites such as Wikipedia, Omniglot, etc. So, Sanskrit is an Indo-European language, like Latin (and Romance languages), Greek, Farsi, Germanic languages, Slavic languages, and others still. As Latin is the "parent" of Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian, Romanian, Catalan, and a few others), so Sanskrit is the "parent" of many Indian languages. The ones with most speakers are Hindi (and Urdu), Bengali, Gujarati, Marathi, Nepali, Punjabi and Konkani. As I said, there are others. For the record, there are some languages in India with a significative number of speakers, unrelated to Sanskrit. These languages are called Dravidian and the most relevant ones are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. They are especially strong in the south of the Indian subcontinent. Being the liturgic language of the Sanātana Dharma religion (that's Hinduism for us in the West), it has a staggering body of literature (more than Classical Greek and Latin put together). It should be noted that many texts of Buddhism and Jainism are also in Sanskrit, or in a Prakrit (vernacular) language derived from it. Politically, Sanskrit is very important: although not a dead language, it is spoken natively in only three villages in India. This would be very little elsewhere. When you consider the population of the country, you'll see how symbolic it is. These villages are very well-known: they are the source of news features, videos, and even commercials. There is one very curious feature of Sanskrit: given the absolute prevalence of the spoken word over the written one, it does not have an official writing system. The Devanagari alphabet is overwhelmingly used, but just for practical reasons. From a technical point of view, it is both a very well-structured language and tough to learn. With almost 4,000 rules, compiled and organised by a grammarian named Pāṇini, it is certainly precise. During the independence process, and given the importance of religion (that's the main reason why we have several countries, and not only one), some people even advocated the use of Sanskrit as the new lingua franca of India, but this would have been impractical. They sure had bigger fish to fry, to put it mildly. I'd like to end this light overview with the notion that, as everything with religious and political connotations, this is a complex matter. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 191 of 223 10 September 2014 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've joined advanced Chinese classes at Dalarna, a Swedish university with an excellent
online program. On Monday I gave a presentation summarizing part of an essay on "Humanist literature" by Zhou Zuoren for my Modern Chinese Literature class. This was my very first time doing a Powerpoint presentation in Chinese and I think it really helped me. Next Wednesday I'll give a presentation on my region's Carnival traditions for my other class. So I thought: how'bout a slightly longer challenge, until the end of the year, to create a 5-10 minute presentation in our target language and ideally record it and put it on Youtube? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5167 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 192 of 223 10 September 2014 at 9:13pm | IP Logged | ||
Agreed! Not that I think I'd manage it, though...How many characters would make 5 minutes? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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