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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 809 of 1317 14 December 2013 at 2:04am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
The first time I read The Little Prince, I was either high A2 or low B1. It was pretty rough going, and I wound up using LingQ to help with the vocabulary (they had the The Little Prince filed under the "Advanced" section). If I were doing it all over again today, I'd probably try readlang, which looks really interesting. These sites make it easy look up unknown words and review the vocabulary. Anyway, if you flip back to the first page of my log, you'll see how reading felt for me back in those days:
So it's perfectly normal that big chunks of The Little Prince are still opaque at this point, and it's definitely worth skipping the harder bits. It also helps to cheat. :-) For example, you could re-read The Little Prince in English, and then use your knowledge of the story to help decipher the Italian. If you wanted, you could even read a paragraph in English, read it again in Italian, and so on. At this point, your goal isn't to understand every word. All you need to do is follow the story, understand some of it, and have fun. Meanwhile, your brain will be seeing common words over and over again, and it will be getting exposed to lots of sentences in Italian. Your brain will start puzzling out the patterns, starting with the most common things first. Over time, a strange process will occur: The sentences that you decipher today with a bit of effort will become easy. And the sentences that make no sense at all will gradually become decipherable. Repeat this process enough times, and you'll be able to pick up an Italian book, read it at a glance, and understand almost every word. If you don't believe me, you can read my through my log and see how much I've improved in the last two years. :-) But don't try to get everything right now. The time for that will be later. At most, you might try to completely understand a paragraph, or perhaps a page. For anything longer than that, let stuff go. Little kids do this all the time: They ignore a huge fraction of what they hear, and just focus on what they can use. Of course, if you're just starting out, you're going to need to cheat more, and you'll understand less. For example, I have a copy of Peter Rabbit in Egyptian hieroglyphics, and if were to lay it down next to the English version, then I'd be happy just to partially decipher a few pages using a dictionary. But by the end of the book, I'd certainly be able to read words like "Peter" and "rabbit" at a glance, and I'd probably be able to decipher at least 50 new words I didn't know before. And how long does this process take? Personally, I saw big jumps after a few hundred pages, and again after a couple of thousand pages. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| corjine Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4020 days ago 55 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 810 of 1317 14 December 2013 at 2:23am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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You're always giving out great advice. :) I will definitely have to pick up the
Englsh edition. Here's my process for doing it (sorry for hijacking your thread--if you want to take this to PM, we can), but I've only done a couple of pages so far, so it will most likely change -Listen to a page or two once with the audiobook only, then read with the audiobook. -Scan to see how many words I do/don't know, then look for the context (for example, even though I didn't know the word "ingoiano", I could pick up from the context that the boa was eating a piece of prey). -Look up the main words I don't know. This is the longest/most difficult part. -Read again, and try to pick up the context of the page (I do one page a day)/what it means to the story, picking up more of it than I did before. -Listen to the audiobook alone, trying to see if I understand just by listening--this is also hard, as Italians seem to speak as if they have no time to. :P It seems like a lot, but it takes very little time and I greatly enjoy it. I know I'm not going to understand EVERYTHING, but I'm trying to understand as much as possible. So far, I'm enjoying it immensely. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 811 of 1317 14 December 2013 at 4:46am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Excellent! What you'll find is that (a) if you read enough, you'll encounter lots of places where a word's meaning is clear from the context, and (b) the words you learn this way will often stick surprisingly well. And this is why it helps to read a lot: the more you read, the more words you'll eventually encounter in "perfect" contexts, and the more often you'll reinforce them.
Looking up words is extremely useful. But if you ever find yourself thinking, "Eh, I'm feeling lazy and I just want to read for a while," feel free to take a break and just enjoy the story. You can always mark words and look them up later. This allows you to "get into the zone" and get lots of exposure very quickly. Both approaches are valid, and I've always gotten the biggest benefit from mixing them: Spending some time with a dictionary, and some time reading as fast as I can to find out what happens next. :-)
This is the important part! Basically, if you're having fun, you'll want to keep doing it, and your brain will stay in contact with Italian long enough to make a difference. To use my Appalachian trail metaphor, if you're enjoying your hike through the woods, you'll want to keep on hiking. And if you keep on hiking, you'll eventually finish the trail, even if you're 65 years old or if you're a life-long couch potato. (And my couch potato friend was freakin' buff by the end of the trail.) Some fun with Egyptian OK, I should be studying conditional probabilities in French right now, but I feel like goofing off. :-) Some background for new readers of my log: just over a year ago, I studied the first 30 lessons of Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique and learned the 200 most common signs using Anki. I made Anki cards of each lesson as I went, reviewed them normally—and then I stopped studying for over a year. Let's see how much of my knowledge remains a year later. :-) I'm going to tackle a bit of the British Museum's translation of Peter Rabbit, starting with the front cover: 
I've never actually tried to read this before, because it's ridiculously far above my level. After all, I've only done 30 Assimil lessons. But still, this should be easy. It's only a couple of words, and we have the translation right there. Plus, I know all the common phonetic signs. The first thing to do is to separate the text into phonetic signs and determinatives. Egyptian apparently worked a bit like Arabic and Hebrew: words were built from "roots" (typically three consonants), and vowels could be swapped in and out to change the part of speech, to conjugate verbs and so on. Egyptian just writes the consonants, and then uses a "determinative" sign to give you a hint and clear up any ambiguity. So if you know (very roughly) 100 phonetic signs and 100 determinatives, you can pick this apart as follows: 
Can you identify the signs for "s" and "t"? Let's break this down a bit further:
Now we can look at the consonants, and look them up in this excellent online dictionary (which uses a French base, but many graduate-level Egyptian courses require incoming students to read English, French and German as prerequisites, so no whining will be permitted):
This gives us:
Not bad! Hieroglyphics are actually a rather nice writing system. You usually get both the pronunciation and some kind of hint as to the actual meaning, and you can go quite far with less than 200 signs. (The other ~700 or so signs used in Middle Egyptian are mostly determinatives, which are often self-explanatory, and which aren't hard to learn as needed.) If I weren't (as always) busy getting better at French, it would be quite a lot of fun to work through this entire book page-by-page. I wouldn't get everything, but who cares? I'd be way better than I was before starting the book. So today, I read the title of my book, and that was fun. :-) Also, Anki rocks: I really did freeze an Assimil course on lesson 30 for a year without forgetting the major points. My total maintenance cost: about 2 reps per day. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4533 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 812 of 1317 14 December 2013 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I had a similar milestone recently in German watching the show Nikita (not a great show, but still...). I had this weird feeling when thinking back about a scene as it felt like it should have been in English, not German. My language skills are no where perfect yet, I would have much more trouble with something more wordy like Mad Men, but it definitely feels like I've reach a different stage in my language processing. WRT your comment about having good/bad days: My wife, who's a solid C2-English has the same problems. When she's tired and been speaking German all day, her pronunciation for English suddenly gets much worse (when normally it is perfect). And she's fluent enough that when she was working in London and had lunch with German colleagues none of them would switch to German as it would have felt unnatural. I take from this that at least for the next couple of decades our 2nd language is never going to be as strong as our first, and will always get harder when we are tired. However, it also seems that at least some of this comes from switching from our T1 to T2. If we are in T2 all the time I think it's a fair bit easier. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5262 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 813 of 1317 14 December 2013 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Speaking of The Little Prince, it's available in Ancient Egyptian. What a world we live in! Edited by iguanamon on 14 December 2013 at 5:23pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| corjine Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4020 days ago 55 posts - 74 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 814 of 1317 14 December 2013 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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........you don't see THAT every day!
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| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 815 of 1317 14 December 2013 at 5:20pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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sDdt n(y) ptr sXat, title (continued)
Digging around in some dictionaries, it looks like sDdt is probably s-Dd.t, a compound word built around Dd "say". Here, the s- appears to be the causitive prefix (loosely analogous to se faire in French, or "got" in "I got kissed!"). The .t here is presumably the infinitive marker, which a quick Google says is actually treated as masculine. That means that n(y) is the correct transcription here. And it turns out that sXat is also masculine; the t is part of the stem, not the feminine marker. See? If I keep poking at it, I learn something. Or at least I can form some hypotheses and keep my eyes open for further evidence. s-Dd.t n(y) ptr sXat, page 1 The English Kindle edition of Peter Rabbit was on sale for $0.99 last night, so I bought a copy. Let's take a look at page 1 in both books. (Happily, both books have the same illustrations, which is a nice indication that I'm on the right page. Context is insanely useful.) 
OK, let's see what I get here. I'm going to break these lines into words and give you my best-guess readings off the top of my head. This is probably full of mistakes! Line 1 
wn pw / sXat {RABBIT} / nDst {LITTLE/WEAK/EVIL?} / 4 / irw / rn {PLURAL} / sn {PLURAL} wn pw. The first chunk here is actually written wn:n p w, with a redundant n, in case the reader has forgotten that the rabbit is read wn. (Hieroglyphics are nice like that.) By position alone, I'm guessing this has to be an idiom for "once upon a time." But my favorite dictionary is coming up blank, and I'm not ready to resort to the scary, authoritative hand-written German dictionary. But it makes some sort of sense: wn shows up in iw-wn "there is" and pw in the second position usually means c'est un… "It's a". (Yes, I think mostly in French when reading hieroglyphics.) So this looks like it's some kind of rare, formulaic sentence opener. That's all I need to know for now. sXat. We already ran into this in the title, so we know it means "rabbit." But why isn't it plural? nDst. We have four consonants here followed by a tiny bird. The bird is the determinative for a large class of words meaning "little, weak, evil, etc." According to the dictionary, nDs means "little, weak." The extra -t probably means this is feminine. But didn't I just read somewhere that sXat is actually masculine? So what's going on here? 4. Hey, hieroglyphic numbers are nice and easy. :-) irw. Not sure what's going on with this one. The dictionary is unhelpful. I'm going to let this go, too. rn. I know from Assimil that this means "name", and the three lines mean plural, so this is rn.w "names". sn. Ah, do I still remember the three different sets of Egyptian pronouns? Yup, this is sn "they/theirs". Putting this together, we have:
Line 2 
Right away, I see the "lion" and "lasso" characters in close proximity, which is a strong hint that isn't actually real Egyptian, but rather a special convention used for transcribing foreign words in Egyptian texts. I found a vaguely useful summary for English-speakers. Anyway, the leading owl is transliterated "m", so it might be this preposition. After that, we have something that reads f l o p z ii {WOMAN}. The next word is m o p z ii {WOMAN}. According to the translators' introduction, you normally would never use {WOMAN} to refer to an animal, but these are talking animals with adorable little waistcoats, and so the translators are winging it, here.
Line 3 
sd {TAIL} mhw {PLANT} {WOMAN} / ptr {MAN} / wn:n:n ??? / sn / Hna sd mhw. According to a translator's footnote, this actually means "linen tail", because the Egyptians didn't know about cotton. I haven't seen the {TAIL} determinative before (the thing which looks like a paddle), so it's presumably one of the 700-odd random determinatives I don't know yet. But now that I've seen it, it will be hard to forget. Don't you love the way the Egyptians spell stuff, and then throw in a bunch of determinatives just to make sure you understood it? wn:n:n. Not sure what this rabbit on top of two waves is doing here. Hna. Hey, this was in Assimil! It means "with".
Yes, the Egyptian text says something like "names theirs Flopsy Mopsy Linen-tail Peter." Egyptian is normally quite terse: There aren't any articles, and the verb "to be" is expressed by simply juxtaposing the words. Line 4 
mwt {WOMAN} / sn / Hr / ?? {LAND} / Xr / mnyt {PART OF TREE} / n(y) mwt. I guessed "mother", and the dictionary agreed. I wouldn't have even bothered to look this up if I weren't writing this post. :-) After all, it's going to appear a dozen times in the book. Hr. On. ?? {LAND}. I don't even recognize that bow-tie sign, but I'm guessing this must correspond to "burrow". I could spend 5 minutes digging through sign lists, but nah, that's work. Xr. Under. mnyt. "Root," according to the dictionary.
So now we have "They with mother theirs in (burrow???) under root of…", which sounds like perfectly reasonable Egyptian to my beginner's ear. Even 30 lessons of Assimil have given me some sense of how things hook together. Line 5 
aS {TREE} / Aa {ABSTRACTION} / wr.t aS. Obviously a tree; the dictionary says cèdre, which a French->English dictionary confirms is "cedar". This is presumably the best translation that could be found for "fir tree". Aa and wr.t. "Large" and "very", both of which I know from Assimil. Here we read the little bird as wr, and not as a determinative for {LITTLE/WEAK/EVIL}. Putting it all together So when I look at this page now, here's what I see:
Again, this seems like perfectly plausible Egyptian grammar. In the process of reading this, I made a bunch of guesses, formed a couple of hypotheses, and ran into a few things that make no sense. That's good enough for now. After all, there are native toddlers who only understand about this much of what they hear. What would be the next step? If I wanted to get better quickly at Egyptian, here's what I'd do: 1. Keep doing Assimil lessons, in hopes that some of these mysteries will become clear. 2. Keep reading a page or two of sDdt n(y) ptr sXat every day. Sometimes I might investigate everything thoroughly (like today). Other times I might leave the dictionary shut and just use my parallel texts, because I'm lazy, and the only way I'm going to resolve some of these mysteries is by seeing more examples. And that means I would need lots of reading. 3. Make a couple Anki cards every day, using either Khatzumoto's "lazy Kanji" format or his "massive-context cloze deletion" (MCD) format. The idea would be to save a few of my most useful discoveries for periodic review. On the other hand, if I were learning Spanish, I could go much faster: I already know lots of Latin-derived vocabulary and plenty of Renaissance-language grammar, and even some quick-and-dirty Listening/Reading would allow me to align Spanish words and grammar onto a French template. Again, no need for perfection: all I need to do is form hypotheses and see whether or not further input supports them. Oh, and did I mention it? Egyptian's "consonants + determinatives" writing system is incredibly awesome. If you're looking for an impractical language to fool around with, and if you want to get well away from Indo-European, it's definitely worth considering. And besides, there's definitely something cool about wandering around the Louvre and reading inscriptions that were ancient long before even the Old Testament was written. OK, enough fun for today. (And it was lots of fun!) Time to work on statistics in French again. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 816 of 1317 15 December 2013 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
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Whew! I just took my first statistics quiz in French, and I scored 4 out of 5 points. (I would have scored 4.5 out of 5 if I hadn't misread the variable names in a question.) The passing score is a 50% average across all the quizzes in the course, so I'm ahead of the game for now.
- I still haven't quite gotten the hang of tribus ("sigma-algebras" in English). I can generally get the right answers, but I can't really apply them to continuous sets, which is the whole point. I actually looked these up in English last night, and it helped me a little—my knowledge of this stuff is approximate even in English, but seeing related concepts under their familiar English names allowed me "zoom out" a bit and get a slightly better grasp. Basically, I only take a small hit from studying these topics in French, but when I'm way out in half-known territory, that small hit may sometimes make a modest difference. - The lecturer whom I thought talked way too quickly with a weird accent? My wife agrees. She can follow his words, but she doesn't seem to enjoy it much. And just for fun, Coursera omitted subtitles for one homework solution this time, and it was one of his. - I tend to leave subtitles on when watching the lectures, but I don't look at them much. After a couple of weeks, I understand 2 of the 3 instructors well enough that I only need to double-check the occasional phrase. Now, the real question: Could I actually survive at a French university? Sure, they would have let me in a year and half ago, thanks to my B2 certificate. But in practice? I think the answer is a tentative "yes", with some big footnotes. For example, if critical material was only covered in lectures, and the instructor mumbled quickly with an accent, I'd be in trouble. Similarly, if somebody assigned 500 pages of reading a week, I could only keep up at the cost of having no social life. But it's situations like these that reveal my limits: Sure, a strong B2 is enough to deal with cable-company tech support on a noisy phone line, or even to get medical care. But it's not quite enough to survive a heavy course load at an elite university without working like a rented mule. Similarly, a strong B2 is enough to talk about pretty much anything with a sympathetic listener. But if you start stacking up complicating factors (a group of busy, uninterested listeners, an unfamiliar topic, not enough sleep), B2 still breaks down, because in the real world, people don't necessarily care about what you're trying to explain unless you convince them, and you do so quickly. And B2 often isn't enough to smoothly claim the floor in a fast, multi-person discussion and convince uninterested people that it's worth paying attention to something complicated. Of course, my ideal goal is to speak quickly, charmingly and convincingly, even about university-level subjects, and even when I'm dead tired. But I've come to realize that this is a hard skill, and even natives and FSI students take years to get there. In theory, I'm happy to spend the next 30 years working on my French. But in practice, I've arranged my life so that my lack of C2 speaking skills is an actual inconvenience on a regular basis. What I secretly hope is that speaking will "snowball" one day, and I'll get a lot better very quickly, the way I did with several other skills. But I've never really found anybody who writes about this process in detail, except for a few passing mentions from advanced people here at HTLAL.
I love that feeling! Even as early as A2, I had become so familiar with my wife's household French that I often had trouble remembering what language she had just used.
Yeah, the combination of fatigue and an active L1 can really do some damage to high-level L2 skills, at least at high intermediate / low advanced levels. My wife's English is excellent (after a decade of full-time immersion), but even she tends to have a stronger accent in English after she's been using a lot of French.
You are filthy, no-good liar to get my hopes up like that! :-) That book isn't "available", at least not to me. It appears to be a hand-made limited edition, and I can't even find conclusive proof that a second copy exists. The author also made a translation of the The Little Prince into another language, and that one is hand-bound and hand-numbered. Of course, the other problem like that is that translating fiction into Middle Egyptian is insanely hard to do well. First of all, it's a non-IE language, and very few people can sit down and read it casually the way I read French. But the larger problem is that we simply don't have enough Middle Egyptian fiction. We've got The Story of Sinhue, which is a cross between a myth and a saga, but things drop off fairly quickly after that. And as as translators of Peter Rabbit complained, that high, mythic style is totally inappropriate for a whimsical children's tale. Sure, the source material may read, "Now hurry along", but in Egyptian, the best we can do is probably, "Now hasten quickly!" So, yes, the Egyptian edition of Peter Rabbit probably sounds like it was written by an ESL student who learned English from The Lord of the Rings. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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