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Cristina’s way TAC 2013 TEAM MIR/SPARTA | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6626 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes  Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 73 of 248 15 January 2013 at 7:46am | IP Logged | |||||
That's a new one :-) I suppose if spelling is the only way to distinguish the words, then the Greeks must have to go around spelling things a lot, the way parents do in front of their children when they don't want the children to understand. Sounds tedious.
English has done the same thing, so it's only natural. According to a program I watched on NRK1 once, Norwegian has also done it. Before, each letter in Tj, Kj, Skj, and Sj were pronounced, they said. But now the letters in each grouping combine into one sound and many people don't even distinguish between all of the groups. I'm not sure I've ever notices any difference between Sj and Skj, but it could just be my American ears that don't notice. In the others I've heard varying degrees of difference in pronunciation, from those people who pronounce all four the same to those who distinguish between three of them. And apparently, the tendency to pronounce them all the same is spreading, according to what I've heard and read on the subject. So maybe Norwegian will become like Greek and we will all have to go around spelling everything whenever we want to talk to each other :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5340 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 74 of 248 20 January 2013 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@ Brun Ugle: I did not know that one about Sj and Skj ever having different pronunciations in Norwegian, I'll
have to look into that :-) I am worried that the Kj will disappear though. So many children struggle with it, and the regime in Norway is that you shall not correct children, which means that sometime even people in their twenties are unable to pronounce it. JANUARY 15TH TO JANUARY 20th EGYPT I am officially in Heaven. 10 hour's sleep every night, 1 minute's walk to a lovely beach with lots of free sun beds, 25 degrees and beautiful sunshine every day, no cooking, no cleaning, no work, no husband and just one kid who's ecstatic to get a whole week's quality time with mom. And lots and lots of time to study Greek and Russian. Life does not get any better than this. Many years ago an Israeli friend of mine told me that in Israel it was customary to take a child on a trip when they turned 13. I found that to be an excellent custom, and have let both my daughters choose a trip. The oldest one picked Israel, the youngest one chose Egypt, which is why I am now at the Red Sea, half an hour from Hurgadha. So today I bathed in the Red Sea. Feel free to hate me :-) I would if I were home right now with snow and 15 degrees below zero. I had heard that there are lots of Russian tourists in Egypt, but my Russian teacher assured me that there would be none here now, due to the political situation. Well either they did not read the memo, or they are braver than she gives them credit for, because 90% of the guests at the hotel are Russians. I, of course, think that this is absolutely brilliant, because even though I have not had what I would call any actual conversations, I do hear a lot of Russian around me. I must look fairly Russian, because staff and tourists alike speak to me in Russian. At least I am becoming very familiar with the Russian word for "let's go" or "come on" - "davai" - because everyone says that all the time. All the staff is trilingual, even our masseuse today was fluent in Russian and spoke some English. I am not exactly a regular at beauty parlors and SPAs as they are ridiculously expensive in Norway, so apart from when I got married and turned 50 I have stayed away, but here both my daughter and I could get both the "Cleopatra package" plus a chocolate massage for the price of doing our nails at home, so we went for it. First 10 minutes of the hottest sauna I have ever been to, then 50 minutes massage with some well scented oil and then our feet and hands were scrubbed with salt and our bodied with hot coconut. I screamed blue murder for part of the treatment as she hit sore spots in my back during the massage, and I am incredibly ticklish, so having my feet scrubbed with salt made me half laugh and half scream, and having almost boiling coconut poured over me was no walk in the park either. We were then draped in towels until I felt like king Tut himself, before they gave us a mud mask, a shower, an orange scented steam sauna and a jacuzzi. My daughter thinks it is the best vacation ever. The good part was that the trip was really cheap, as most Norwegians do not dare to go to Egypt right now. So as long as we are not killed or taken hostage, I think we made a great deal. We'll do the chocolate massage tomorrow. I'll keep you posted. What is even better is that I get to do lots of studying. I have read through the whole of "Read and write Greek script". I write almost all the words and do every exercise, as I really want to have mastered the alphabet before I go home, so it has taken a long time, but I trust that it is worth it. They keep saying things that I find weird though. They have for instance said that it is not very common to say please (παρακαλω) in Greek, claiming that: - "[The Greeks] tend to view excessive politeness as a distancing device and therefore avoid using it." Now putting on my Spanish cultural bag, I can understand that you might not use "please" all the time with close friends, but I find it strange that they would hardly use it with foreigners either. Can anyone verify this? They also say that: - "the "χ" is actually an H! It makes exactly the kind of sound you'd find in words like Himalaya, hibiscus and hibernation. " That had me pretty confused, as I have always though of it as a slightly weaker Spanish "j", and to make my confusion complete they then say that: - although the sound "approximates the English H, it is probably closer to the Scottish or German Loch". If they had just given me that last piece of information I would have been fine, but I do not see why they bring the English H into it. The Greek g (Γ/γ) is transcribed as wh (Γάλα - /whala/). Now I struggle to find a good way to describe the pronunciation of that letter myself, as I tend to think of it as something like an extremely soft fricative "g" but I cannot make any sense of "wh" here. I loved the "Teach Yourself Russian" and recommend it to everyone, but my feelings are cool towards the Greek one. I still love the Greek alphabet, but that is no thanks to this book. I am working on lesson 4 and 5 of the Assimil, but I find it to be a lot tougher than the Russian Assimil. They introduce lots of Grammar already in the 4th lesson, which I find quite frustrating. I am on lesson 5 of Pimsleur, and I must admit that I adore the Pimsleur courses. I had never heard of them before I came on this forum, nor Assimil, nor Michel Thomas, so those were real discoveries. I had not heard of Rosetta Stone either, for that matter, but there I gather that I have not lost out on much. I have also started a new Agatha Christie in Russian. That sometimes feels like an exercise in futility, since there is so much I do not understand - most of the words with meaning in fact- but I am pretty obstinate, ploughing on until I start understanding something. So far Hastings has come from South America to London on a surprise visit to Hercule Poirot, only to find him ready and packed to go to South America to visit him among other things, and then a guy appears in the flat who remembers nothing but the name and address of Hercule Poirot. After leaving for Southampton Poirot suddenly got a hunch that the man could be in danger, and at their return they find the guy dead. I'll see where this leads. I have actually spoken quite some German here. Some guys on the beach were speaking in German about wanting to go on the Trans Siberian Express, so I butted in, and we talked German for about an hour and a half yesterday, and one of them came over for an hour and talked German to me today. They claimed my German was good, which is a lie, but their alternative was to speak Russian, which they did not know, so in view of that my German must have felt absolutely fantastic to them. I also had my weirdest language class ever yesterday. There was an offer to have a 20 minutes Arabic lesson for free, which I obviously signed up for, but between the worst teacher known to man, booming disco music in the back ground and the only four other pupils being Russian and no one being able to hear much of what anything anyone else said, it was not extremely effective. The teacher said: So what do you want to learn? And then he wrote about 30 words in Arabic at which point I gently suggested that we should perhaps revise a little before we continued with more? I did however learn how to say "I would like a Coke and Sprite, please" - Ana ausa wahid Coke wa wahid Sprite, mem fadlek". The waiter was besides himself with pleasure, and I did better in Arabic than when I tried ten minutes later in English when I managed to ask him for a Cock and a Sprite. I have never been so relieved in my life that the background noise and his lousy English did not make him catch my mistake. Those English vowels can be quite tricky sometimes. As for Arabic our head waiter Ahmed says he will teach me a little every day. I had a stupid mistake in German too, which was also embarrassing. The guy was telling me about how he had become a father at the tender age of 18, so I wanted to respond "So you started quite early then". Early being "früh" in German, but somehow it came out as "froh" instead (pleased) . He looked a bit surprised for a moment, but then seemed to understand what I had meant, and repeated what I should have said. I was really impressed at how friendly and helpful they all were. I had to ask them to confirm a few terms I was uncertain about, and I probably butchered the grammar brutally, like I usually do, but the flow was quite good, so my daughter was convinced that I was absolutely fluent. Otherwise the cultural differences between Norway and Egypt are particularly clear when you travel with a 13 year old with long blonde hair, the face of an angel and the body of Marilyn Monroe. She gets more compliments here in 10 minutes than she gets in Norway in a year. Make that in 10 years. The first days I was uncomfortable, but now I have just gotten used to everyone saying they want to marry her. No actual offers of camels yet though :-) but I do not think there is a man on the compound who does not know that she is called Martina, is from Norway and is 13 years old. Yesterday she even got a compliment from a Russian woman - though it sounded a bit strange to me. She asked if it was my girl, and I said that she was my daughter, and then she said that she was very beautiful, and something which sounded like she had a face like chocolate?! Does that sound like anything a Russian might say? I thought perhaps it meant that she thought she was sweet, but I have never heard that one before. One of the Arabic masseuses kissed my daughter's forehead, which she also felt to be a bit strange. I guess we are just very cold in Norway, but we do not usually kiss people we do not know. Even if we find them cute:-) And there are guys here that I have shook hands with 20 times already. Between my daughter's beauty and my politeness and willingness to use the 8 Arabic words I know plus that I ask everyone what their names mean, they are treating us as part of the family. Our pool waiter Said's name means happy, the man in the reception who helped us with the internet connection was called something like Mahkram, which means generous, the uncountable Ahmeds mean "he who prays to God" according to one of them, and Karim evidently meant something like beloved or dear. Their Russian is better than their English, so I may have misunderstood some of the translations. I do not hear them using anyone else's name though, or shaking hands with the other tourists, so I guess we have made a good impression. Before I came I thought that going to a place with so many Russians might be a bad idea. You rarely get the best impression of a people by meeting the kind who go on charter tours, but on the whole I have been favorably impressed. They are not noisy, or rowdy or obnoxious like Scandinavians, Brits and Germans usually are on tourist resorts. I have seen two drunk Russians so far after 5 days, which I think is amazing. Of course my daughter and I are usually in bed by 9, and I guess most of the heavy drinking happens after that, but I have not heard any noise in the evening. The only thing I have noticed is that they are not big on saying please or thank you, and some of them literally grunt if the service is not quick enough. I can see that the Egyptians get offended, though they answer as politely as they can. I guess in that respect we stand out. There are not 300 normal Norwegians here to give us a bad name, as we are the only ones, so we are doing fine:-) This week's linguistic catch: Russian : 4 hours 10 minutes Greek: 15 hours 25 minutes German: 2 hours 30 minutes Arabic: 25 minutes And as usual I do not count the English which is massive amounts. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 20 January 2013 at 4:20pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| fabriciocarraro Hexaglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Brazil russoparabrasileirosRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4721 days ago 989 posts - 1454 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, EnglishB2, Italian, Spanish, Russian, French Studies: Dutch, German, Japanese | Message 75 of 248 20 January 2013 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It sounds that you're having a great time there, Cristina! I'm happy for you both =) Say hi to Martina btw, it was kind of her to have joined us on the last Skype meeting for a bit, her mom's strange friends. =P I must admit that her English made me a little jealous. =P
My wife told me that a LOOOOOOOOOOT of Russians go on trips like that, and mostly to Egypt, Turkey and some Asian countries. It's very cheap for them apparently (and for you). I'd love to go one day, but I'll have to take my time, since it's not as cheap for Brazilians (the price for flight tickets now is just crazy). Anywya, I hope you get lots and lots of practice there! What a great opportunity! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5340 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 76 of 248 20 January 2013 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@fabriciocarraro: Martina says hi back, and you made her day with er comment on her English. Her accent is
better than mine is or ever was, so it is obvious that massive TV input is useful. And Egypt is not usually all that cheap for us, but since most Norwegians are unwilling to come here right now it was a bargain. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5215 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 77 of 248 20 January 2013 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
What a delightful post: travel, language learning, and cultural differences all in one, and enlivened with your personal touch. - Thanks! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5340 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 78 of 248 20 January 2013 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@ Songlines: Thank you! I always try to include more than just what I have studied, as that is rarely so much
fun as life in general :-) It is nice to know that it is appreciated.! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 6148 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 79 of 248 20 January 2013 at 7:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
I wish my parents had been fans of that custom! Though my grandparents did take me and my brother to Prague the summer that I turned 13, and my parents had taken us to 11 different countries by the time I was 16, so I guess I can't complain too much. Still, it's cold and rainy here in Croatia, so I am rather jealous of your warm Egyptian holiday. ;) Glad to hear that you're having such a great time! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4364 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 80 of 248 20 January 2013 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The kiss in the forehead of a child is so sweet! Mind you, by sweet ladies not creepy men... People kiss a lot here as well, you know.
What a wonderful adventure, not to mention language practice. Good work on your language hours as well. You are an inspiration! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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