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Learning Word Inflection | ||
Tags: Morphology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Ellsworth Senior Member United States Joined 4985 days ago 345 posts - 528 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish | Message 1 of 8 26 April 2012 at 1:55am | IP Logged | ||
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I am curious about your methods of learning word inflections in other languages,
especially highly inflectional ones like Finnish and Russian. I have tried a number of methods, from trying to learn from tables like this http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Finnish_declension to just trying learn word by word. I really have disliked all methods I have used and none have really been especially effective. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5419 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 2 of 8 26 April 2012 at 2:02am | IP Logged | ||
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I was going to post the same question for learning Irish. It makes the idea of learning
vocabulary daunting. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6731 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 8 26 April 2012 at 10:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Green sheets!
And they are green because I once bought a package of thick green paper, and now I used it for morphological tables because they then stick out between all the white sheets of paper. There is no other reason. Method: 1) get two or three grammars - they don't have to be big scholarly works as long as they have the essential morphology. And now compare them critically. Do they use the same terminology? Do they use the same ordering of the subtables? Do they agree?? 2) think the system thoroughly through and decide how it can be expressed as logically and economically as possible, leaving out irregular patterns restricted to a few words and elements which are said to be archaic and little used. Ask yourself how the system 'ticks' - which parameters are important, and notice parallel systems which depend in a regular way on a preceding element. Think also about ways to combine several tables in one - for instance I have put the Icelandic prepositioned articles, adjectives, nouns and postclitic articles on one page and everything I need to know about the regular verbal paradigms in Latin on another. It is certainly possible, but rarely seen in grammars - maybe because the result looks scary if you haven't built the system yourself. 3) think through how you can use color and graphic signs to mark specific components or patterns. For instance you can use different colors to indicate root, infix and ending (in the most practical way, whether or not it conforms with linguistic evidence). For instance the 1. person singular 1. class imperfectum in Latin could be written as "-bam" (eg. "amabam"). It takes time, but these sheets are supposed to last for a long time so you can just as well do them as informative and pretty as possible. 4) please notice that only 'fixes and endings should be indicated in the tables. This not only saves space, but is also logical because you always will have a concrete verb or noun in mind when you use them - cfr. 5. And as earlier mentioned, irregular words should not be allowed to clutter your layout - they belong in separate tables. 5) when you have made a green sheet chances are that you at the same time have learned a paradigm or two by heart. For the rest you can of course do drills and memorize endings etc, but the most important use for the green sheets is as a reference which you keep within reach as long as you need it. If you are in doubt about a form in a text you can have a peek at the sheet, and if you are writing stuff you can confer with it whenever you aren't certain about something. Raw memorizing of paradigms is of course legal, but also fairly boring. PS: one tip for sctroyenne: as you know the Celtic languages are funny because words change at both ends. However eclipsis and lenition normally depend on the preceding words or they indicate a specific grammatical form (read gender). In the first case you should see the consonant mutations as something that grammatically belongs to the preceding word rather than the one that is affected - or in some cases it is caused by a lost word ("do" in the past tense) og the word before the preceding word. If you look as the changes in nouns as something that is decided by an articles or the absence of an article and then list the possible consquences using rule names instead of specific consonant changes, then the system becomes fairly manageable and even shows sign of internal logic. Once you have seen that a rule applies you can always start to wonder about the concrete outcome with a certain initial consonant (with special rules for nouns beginning with vowels or s). Thinking in specific changes from the beginning results in chaos. Edited by Iversen on 26 April 2012 at 1:41pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ellsworth Senior Member United States Joined 4985 days ago 345 posts - 528 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish | Message 4 of 8 26 April 2012 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hey nice post Iversen. It is great when someone puts so much time into an explanation.
Really helpful. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5084 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 5 of 8 26 April 2012 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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General rules can learnt by heart, other things are like learning words: you just
remember go-went-gone, do-did-done, Irish baile-bailte, post-postanna and so on. You can learn all the necessary forms with a word, reading helps a lot. Sometimes one can learn all the exceptions at once (or all frequent), for example English irregular plurals: man- men, woman-women, child-children... In Irish, I think it is the nom. pl. of nouns which is the most complex part. There are only ten irregular verbs. The consonant mutations do not cause morphological problems, only syntactical. The Finnish declension table doesn't seem very difficult for me, because words seem to obey some rules and many patterns are not shown. Edited by Марк on 26 April 2012 at 1:50pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6625 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 6 of 8 26 April 2012 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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In Finnish it worked for me to focus on one case at a time or a small group of related cases (2-3). That's how it also is in the textbooks.
For verbs, I've recently started using my own order which is different from the traditional one. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4729 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 7 of 8 27 April 2012 at 3:09am | IP Logged | ||
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I once learned some verbs in Japanese in their various forms, like
泳ぐ、泳いで ... 遊ぶ、遊んで ... 働く、働いて ... 帰る，帰って ... 食べる、食べて These are "avatars" of their specific "groups". So when I encounter (for example) a verb with a "gu" ending in its dictionary form, I can either convert it to "ide" automatically already, or if I'm in bad shape, remember "oyogu" and derive "ide" from "oyoide". The example above is a conjunctive form. You can replace the "e" at the end with an "a" and got "past tense". You can stick an iru/imasu or aru/arimasu after that for different grammatical reasons. Overall, having such "avatars" really helps. Yes, there are conjunction rules out there, and funny applications such as songs to learn them, but this above was how it worked for me. Irregulars are few in Japanese (actually only 2 in modern Japanese, plus some archaic ones in set phrases), thank god. Now, handling adjectives is pretty easy, as there are only 2 "sorts", and nouns are all the same, except for some tricky things like "which can be used to form a -suru verb and which can't", but this is also something one can figure out quickly. I'd say, you need to use the language for a while to develop automatisms. There's no need to learn rules by heart. Grammar is a relatively small part, compared to stuff like vocabulary, which will really take a long time, as you can't figure out the meanings of words from knowing other words easily in every language. In Japanese, readings of Kanji and stuff in different compounds can drive you insane ^^ Grammar, although said to be the hardest part, or registers of speech, said to be alien, are a walk in the park in comparison. Tons and tons of the same sounds in various combinations, tons of homonyms, written in different letters for different words and meanings, that makes Japanese grammar something to laugh about. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rowerzysta Newbie Poland Joined 4640 days ago 12 posts - 20 votes | Message 8 of 8 27 April 2012 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree with Serpent. Genitive and partitive, in addition to nominative, are probably the most important, while adding the locational cases is quite easy and regular. The other cases aren't used so much and can be learned in a later time. In Finnish, more important than learning full declensions by heart, is learning the open/closed syllable difference, weak and strong grades, the k/p/t changes, etc. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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