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Vermillon’s TAC’13 鶴 & Lugus | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4680 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes  Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 57 of 73 04 September 2013 at 12:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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August 2013 Report
Hey, almost on time! At least this report is worth only a month and a half, not three like the previous one. Loads of stuff happened, four weeks in China really impacted my studies, my respective motivation for various languages (didn't make Korean and Japanese come back...), and tons of purchases are somehow making me reconsidering my plans for this last third of the year. Mandarin / 普通話: Well, four weeks in China, one would believe, would be pretty awesome for a Mandarin learner, and I should say they were. I've had days without speaking any English at all, and it was just much easier to communicate in Mandarin. In the course of the month, I've realised several things: -the first is that after not taking care of it, my vocabulary has regressed a lot, but somehow all the words I have forgotten don't seem to be words people use in their daily life, because I can't remember once not understanding what people were telling me. Despite this, I still feel the need to get back to a more decent vocabulary level and I've started going back over the HSK+TOCFL lists and patiently re-learning them, focusing on usage (something I didn't do in the past...), tones (that I did, and I'm pretty solid I believe) and above all, being able to write in both simplified and traditional (which I could only read until now). I should be able to manage it before the end of March, which is the time these two exams usually take place. -The second thing I've realised is that I was fluent (yes, I said it). I didn't say I had amazing skills -I'm certainly not one of those foreigners you see on Chinese TV giving a perfect speech- but I know I can talk completely fluently about anything that I need, and I even had the opportunity to shout some Mandarin at some hotel staff and police officer during my stay: that must be a measure of success, I suppose. Anyway, my Mandarin could use some work, but it's fine as it is, and hopefully getting back to reading novels and watching movies will give me enough exposure to improve. Minnanhua / Hokkien / Taiwanese(?) / 閩南話: Minnanhua was obviously the highlight of my stay in China, since I spent the entire time in a Minnan-speaking family, first in Shanghai and then in a village near Quanzhou. I didn't manage to have conversations in Minnanhua, but I could definitely make sentences about anything I had decided I would need for the daily life (food, activities, animals, people etc): the choice of learning the equivalent of HSK-1-2-3 in Minnanhua was retrospectively the best idea I could have, given the paucity of material. Needless to say, a foreigner forming sentences in Minnanhua, when the wife of my girlfriend's brother (a girl from Hubei) couldn't say a single word, really made a tremendous impression, the high point of which was definitely singing the classics I had learnt with my gf's father: there again, I believe it was a great idea to learn these songs in advance, as inevitably I sung all of them (including some new ones, it's not that difficult once you understood how pronunciation works). A note on the "standard-ness" of Mandarin: it is only a standard where it is spoken, and I've met a lot of people who couldn't speak any Mandarin (and who directly addressed me in Minnanhua) and even more which had a very heavy accent and frequently had no clue about how to express some idea in Mandarin. And obviously, the language spoken everywhere was Minnanhua, and they're not quite fond of Northerners. So it's a very positive outcome for me, and I'm really extremely satisfied with the survival level of Minnanhua I've reached. I have no plan to further expand it for now, but I keep on reviewing what I know, and when the time comes, I'll try to learn more about it. Classical Chinese / 文言: Classical Chinese is of course the third language directly related to my stay in China. I didn't finish reading 说苑 during my stay, neither have I finished it by the end of August as I had planned, but after over 400 pages, I can now expect to finish it by the end of the month... (fingers crossed). I expected a lot from China in terms of expanding my collection of books, and apart from a few books in Mandarin (like getting my hands again on 四世同堂 after having lost it in a stolen suitcase...), I bought a huge amount of books in Classical Chinese: for around £100, I got my hands on approximately 15000 pages worth of books (all in traditional characters, vertically, which wasn't that easy to find in China), which should take me, given my current rhythm, somewhere between 3 and 5 years to read. Perhaps it was a bit stupid, but I couldn't resist nor choose, so I bought everything I wanted: 四書、道德經、孝經、尚書、史記、莊子、春 秋、戰國策、三國志、漢書、列子. I can't wait to start reading that! :) Breton / Brezhoneg: I didn't do much with Breton, but I kept reviewing it every day, with a rather poor success rate on mature cards (86%...), but slowly I'm getting better on the cards I had learnt too quickly. It may not be extremely useful, but I've had the chance to put my hands on the old Assimil in 1 volume, which I didn't even know existed since everywhere they're selling only the first of a 2-volume edition (and the second is impossible to find), and I'm very slowly going over its lessons, adding to my deck the bits and pieces that were not covered in the more recent book: and there's a lot to say here: while the edition by Kervella presents a very polished version of Breton, with almost no dialectal variants (ok, they given "hiziv" probably 3 different pronunciations in the entire book, but that's about it), the Morvannou edition is filled with dialectal variants and pronunciations, and its spelling is entirely different (I'm still adopting the modern spelling, however). I don't know what to think of all these variations, since the Breton taught in Kervella seems closer to the other book I have (ni a gomz brezhoneg) and also to the TV broadcast I could see: has there been a certain standardisation of the language in the few decades that separate the two books? I don't know, but I'll keep with it. Also, waiting for my reading recommendation software to be a bit more mature, I've started collecting online sources of Breton, and the language seems alive and well: Death Metal album reviews (!!?), litterature, politics, everything is there. There are also lots of people tweeting in Breton, and that makes for easy and small reading sessions. Wanderlust: Following on last month's comment about wanderlust taking the major part of this TAC for me, it certainly went a step further: this summer has been amazing in terms of people selling their old Assimils, and I've expanded for little money (sometimes for free, "l'allemand sans peine") my collection to languages I don't necessarily plan to learn for now, but it's nice to browse from time to time, and I might use them before travelling.. talking of which, I'll spend a week-end in Bergen by the end of October (probably not the best time of the year to visit Norway, but that's all right), and I hope to get some opportunity to use my Norwegian and improve it somewhat before going there. I haven't decided yet how to improve it (suggestions, for a 2 month mildly-intense rush?), but I need to figure out a plan before the end of this week. I also continued revisiting my Polish course form last year, and as I said, following the same principle as for Norwegian and Breton, adding the lessons with audio to Anki and going over them: I've found it to work much better than what I've done last year, and this is probably obvious but not only is my retention better, but that retention also helps me identifying patterns. Anyway, I'm nowhere near being able to use it I believe (either the book has a useless content or Polish is more difficult than Norwegian/Breton), but I keep working at it and I should have finished the book (I have an older version too, with much more meat on it...) by the end of the month. I've also started gathering online sources to read for later in the year. Finally, I couldn't resist longer and started doing the same for Spanish (have many speakers around me, but I'm not rushing, I have time), Italian (I haven't helped an Italian guy at the airport in Shanghai, woot...), German and Swahili... it is very addictive and it makes difficult to resist adding other languages (Modern Greek and Armenian, for travel reasons...), but takes a lot of time and it is difficult to keep a not too unreasonable balance... Anyway, surely in a month I'll have given in to temptation, but in the end it probably doesn't hurt, does it? Summary TL;DR. It's a mess, I'm really getting in the festive mood of the second half of the year, when I want to discover every language and don't care if I don't go deep in any of them. I still feel I could get reading skills in several of them, and given my personality, that's probably enough for most of these. If need arises, I'll surely learn to speak them. / Now have enough books in Classical Chinese for the next few years. / I still qualify as a member of both my TAC teams, that's an improvement over last year in terms of longevity! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 58 of 73 04 September 2013 at 9:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I think the thing with Breton is that they tried to standardise the orthography some
years ago. There's a lot of hatred from purists (who don't like the new Breton, as it uses too many loanwords, usually from French or gallo) about the "unified" Breton. I made a video about why I was learning Breton a while back (in French) and I got comments from some purists who were like "don't learn Breton, there's never been one Breton, the new Breton is shit, learn Gallo instead". Annoying. In any case, I use the more or less standard orthography too, at least as far as in I don't forget mutations and such :) There's always Radio Breizh which I put on a few times. Actually death metal (metal genres are NOT capitalized...) and Breton would be a good combination in my view. There are plenty bands in that genre, not only death metal, but also folk metal, etc, who borrow from Celtic music (some go as far as to include whole Celtic melodies and instruments and base whole albums on Celtic history). I often find that in the metal genre, you'll have 90 bands writing about death, blood, gore, and generally being a nuisance, and then 10 having very sophisticated scientific opinions on everything and doing super-deep research for some reason. If you want to know what I mean - the song "Inis Mona" by Eluveitie is actually based on the melody of Tri Martolod. It's just a rearrangement with English/Gaulish lyrics and heavy guitars, haha... (Also, their singer is into gwerz. And he also is trilingual - he learned French in addition to Swiss German (and regular German I guess), and English). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| druckfehler Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4870 days ago 1181 posts - 1912 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Korean Studies: Persian | Message 59 of 73 04 September 2013 at 10:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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You seem to have had a blast in China, which is great to read. I'm glad that learning Minnanhua payed off and you had such positive experiences. Congrats on your Mandarin fluency! I guess you can only really evaluate that in country where you have to use the language in many different situations. I think when Korean and Japanese are ready to make a comeback they'll let you know ;)
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| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 60 of 73 06 September 2013 at 11:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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hmm...could "Inis Mona" be connected in any way with "Ynys Mon", which is the Welsh name
for Anglesey? (Word-play perhaps?) A few interesting linguistic snippets in the Wikipedia entry: Anglesey or Ynys Mon A comment here does suggest a connection: Inis Mona 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 61 of 73 07 September 2013 at 8:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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That is exactly the connection.
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| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4680 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 62 of 73 07 September 2013 at 11:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I believe it stems from their hatred of the forced French standardisation, and they see any attempt at unifying Breton as repeating the Jacobin oppression they suffered from in the past. Personally, I think that this kind of stubbornness goes against the survival of the language, and fortunately the Breton taught in schools is somewhat unified (perhaps to the exception of Vannetais, which they consider almost to be a separate language, going as far as having "trilingual" books, French, Breton, Vannetais). If anything, standardisation of the writing is necessary for the development of language/speech processing tools.
Seen them years ago in Paris at a "Pagan Fest" (entirely Pagan Black Metal), and they were an awesome live band, but somehow I've never listened to them out of that festival. Other bands that, imho, successfully introduce celtic/pagan elements in their metal would be Heol Telwen, who sing most(?) of their songs in Breton (though you obviously need the lyrics sheet to understand anything..) and make a nice use of the bombard, and Aes Dana (their album La Chasse Sauvage. There's another band with the same name...), who interestingly have an Industrial/Black counterpart (same members). Hmm, long time I haven't listened to those.
Ah, thanks for your kind words :) I'm pretty sure Korean and Japanese will be there, somewhere in the future! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4709 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 63 of 73 07 September 2013 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hahaha, I've been to a few Paganfests... I think one in Haarlem, one in Antwerp, one
in... Amsterdam was it...Most of the bands there tend to be Scandinavian or German, as usually the focus is on the Norse bands. I have a Vannetais dictionary, not even a Breton one (I use an online Breton/Dutch one). The interesting thing about Eluveitie's albums is that all their albums are based on Celtic (specifically Helvetian and old Gaulish) history, and they use genuine old texts. They also work with Celtologists to understand the pronunciation of those texts. So there's actually a process behind it... which is better than the usual death metal "gore and horror" lyrics that are pervasive and which make me throw up. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 64 of 73 09 September 2013 at 11:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have nothing to contribute to this thread regarding languages, but... sometimes I'm tempted to move to mainland Europe just for the metal festivals - we hardly ever get things like Paganfest in the UK! Although Eluveitie have come here a couple of times.
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