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Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 3953 of 3959 21 September 2015 at 6:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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EN: Since I started my second log thread at 'the other forum' I have been publishing paintings with multilingual commentaries there. I did something similar here in 2009, but I had placed the image files on a server which now is history, and therefore the images have become invisible. Never mind, the problem is that I only spoke Germanic and Romance languages in the late 70s and early 80s when I painted them (plus the alphabets of Greek and Russian and a few scattered words in both), so to write about them I have spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with literature in those languages, including literature in their medieval forms. I have spent a fair amount of time on Greek and done some Indonesian and Russian wordlists the last couple of weeks, but very little on the Slavic languages. So to get back to my normal activity level I have made 'antologies' for intensive study of texts from the internet in Polish and Serbian, and in the bus back home from my job today I read a number of pages about Polish zoos.
POL: Skupiłem się na stronach internetowych do ogrodów zoologicznych, bo odwiedził pięć ogrodów zoologicznych w sierpniu (plus dwa w Czechach). Zoo Łódź miał dobrą długą historyczną opis, i znalazłem ten sam opowiadania od ogrodów w Katowicach i Krakowie. Dodatkowo, mam sześć stron o muzeach w Szczecinie, Toruniu i Łodzi oraz małym miasteczku więcej, którego nazwisko zapomniałem. SER: У српском, имам један чланак о курсу и неколико потрошачких чланакima - укључујући чланак о произвођачима који имају тенденцију попуните мање хране у истим паковањима по непромењеним ценама. Преваранти! Требало би да прочитате цену по кг - иначе они те варају! Edited by Iversen on 21 September 2015 at 6:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 3954 of 3959 27 September 2015 at 11:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have been asked by PM for my reactions to a project that should result in the publication of lots of bilingual book titles, and thee ahs also been a vcouple of other threads about bilingual texts. Because the subject obviously is relevant in a broader context my answer from the mailbox follows below (with a few minor corrections):
It is true that I have made lots of interlinear texts for my intensive text studies, but for me the point is that they have to be very literal, but not necessarily 100% correct so I have mostly used machine translations. In a few cases I have found translations on the internet which very so close to the original that it was possible to use them, but it often takes a fair amount of research to find useful texts - especially of non-literary texts, which I prefer to literature. I don't really feel tempted to use administrative texts of the kind you can get in parallel versions from for instance the Eureopan Union, but even that wouldn't solve the problem - they are not nearly as parallel as you would expect, and besides I would be bored to death studying that kind of writings. As for the process itself I have - after much experimentation - concluded that it isn't worth the trouble to make truly interlinear texts. It is enough that the two versions are in parallel columns, and it is easy to make such texts once you have got your texts - to align the sentences you can manipulate the column widths and if necessary fine-tune the alignments by the use of slightly diffeent font sizes. If I have understood it right, the person who sent my the PM which sparked of this comment has in mind to publish complete books in an interlinear layout. If the translations are very loyal to the originals it would definitely be a laudable initiative, but for intensive study you don't need whole books. If you're a total novice to a language even one page will be more than enough for one session - and a novice will be even more dependent on the quality of the translation than an intermediate learner (measured both on both 'loyalty' and correctness). On the other hand an intermediate learner can get through vast amounts of text, but is not as dependent on the correctness if the errors just are so gross that they become visible - and that's why machine translations are acceptable. And personally I prefer being able to choose my own texts and get them translated rather than having to search for suitable texts with better-than-average translations. Those who try to find materials for listening-reading sessions will need even more stuff, but they also need an audio rendering which is just as loyal to the original text as the translation - if not more. In practice I have given up on this methods because it is so difficult to match up an original text, a translation and a reading. But I do think the method would be efficient, and even with shorter texts as on G.L.O.S.S it is a valuable tool. So could a homepage with free bilingual texts be useful for learners? yes definitely, but I wonder whether anybody can keep up the spirit for long time with a project which primarily is of benefit to less advanced learners than yourself. You need to be quite advanced to judge the merits of a proposed translation, and even more advanced to produce such translations yourself (which even may be illegal due to copyright reasons). So I wish those who are willing to sacrifice some of the own time for the common good all well, but I don't think I would want to commit myself to such a project. Edited by Iversen on 27 September 2015 at 11:31pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 3955 of 3959 02 October 2015 at 6:34am | IP Logged | ||
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I have added two small word counts to my list at page 428, one for Greek and one for Indonesian.
For Greek I used my Greek-Danish dictionary by Rolf Hesse (Pataki), but I was puzzled to see an estimated of 35.000 words all in all last time (2013), but only 27100 in 2009 and 23.5000 this time so I checked the spreadsheet with my historical data (in statistical form - not the original sheets with the words). And then I saw that the true number should be a total of 27000 words estimated for the whole book, which of course meant that the other figures had to be corrected. The difference between between approx. 23.500 and twice 27000 doesn't bother me - I have only counted 161 words this time so the figures should be taken with a pinch of salt. However as the stats look this time I definitely knew 69 words (43%), 32 were so-so or guessable (20%) and only 60 were definitely unknown (37%), corresponding to estimated totals of 10000 known, 4500 lala and 8500 unknown words in total (out of an estimated 23500). The percentages are the most interesting because they show little progress since 2013, but my gut feeling is that I understand Greek better know. This is however not something you can read from the numbers.. 2009: 7900 - 29 % - - Greek - Pataki (total 27100) 2009: 10600 - 32 % - - Greek - Langenscheidt (total 33000) 2013: 7000 - 18 % - 2000 - 5 % - - Greek - Gl.Langenscheidt (total 39000) 2013: 9500 - 35 % - 3500 - 13 % - - Greek - Pataki (total 27000 (not 35000 as previously indicated)) 2015: 9000 - 37 % - 4500 - 20 % - - Greek - Pataki (total 23500) The Indonesian word count is only the second one I have done, and I only have one dictionary. But here the progress is clearly visible - albeit from a very low level in 2013: 2013: 2700 - 22 % - 500 - 3 % - - Indonesian - Tuttle (total 12000) 2015: 4500 - 44 % - 1500 - 12 % - - Indonesian - Tuttle (total 11000) As always the percentages are the most relevant because they aren't as strongly dependent on the size of the dictionary as the absolute figures. If you want a figure for your total number of known words in a language you should in principle use the largest dictionary you can find - but I only have two monster dictionaries, one for English and the other for Spanish. In both cases the percentages go down, but the estimates for known words nevertheless remain above the figures obtained with smaller dictionaries: 2009: 34400 - 17 % - - Spanish - Bratli (total 200.000 (officially)) 2009: 19900 - 41 % - - Spanish - Gyldendal (total 48000) 2009: 17600 - 44 % - - Spanish - Langenscheidt (total ca 40000) (...) 2006: 35000 - 78 % - - English - Gyldendal (gl.?) (total 45000) 2009: 51600 - 31 % - - English - Webster unabridged (total 165900) 2009: 43500 - 91 % - - English - Gyldendal (total 48000) 2009: 27600 - 92 % - - English - Oxford Advanced (total 30000) (...) The highest figure I have obtained for English in an internet vocabulary test was 51.000. I have quoted it somewhere in this log thread, but heaven knows where - it has just become too big to look through in a pinch. But based on the results with the two large dictionaries it is clear that the percentages taper off with dictionaries that have headword numbers above 100.000 or so so I doubt that using an English dictionary with twice as many words would push those 51.000 words much further up. And the vocabulary numbers shouldn't hide the fact that even a Spanish or English child speaks those languages better than I do. Edited by Iversen on 02 October 2015 at 6:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 3956 of 3959 05 October 2015 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I mentioned some of the same thing at LanguageLearners' forum, and afterwards it turned out that the true highest numner was 77.717 'words' - which patently is absurd. The relevant link to the old test from the Plenilune site is here, and the link to the parallel discussion in my log at LanguageLearners' is here. The 51.000 - which I quoted from memory - turns out simply to be my highest result in my own dictionary-based tests. But my other results - both from the intenet and from my own tests - lie between 30.000 and 40000, and given the limitations of the vocabularies I think that my total English vocabulary (including rare words, Anglisized proper names and technical/scientific terms) lies around 40.000 headwords or slightly above - or roughly what you would expect from a native educated Anglophone, but with a different profile. For instance I know fewer names of household items because I haven't had to buy them in an English speaking country - but I'm sure I know more dinosaurs and weird old musical instruments and physical instruments than most Anglophones.
Apart from that: I have spent some time on Bahasa Indonesia yesterday, because I found my good old Indonesian and English guide booklets from (and about) Singapura under a heap of paper. I used these two as my key to unlocking the door to the reputedly easiest language in the Far East, and I found a sheet inside the Indonesian version at page 77 - so that's where I got to before they disappeared under a mountain of paper (Gunung Kertas - not yet found on any map). I wrote about it at 'the other site' because I can upload pictures there. Which is one main reason that my updates here have become rarer. Both places have however much less activity than HTLAL had in its heyday, which is sad. Edited by Iversen on 05 October 2015 at 1:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 3957 of 3959 09 October 2015 at 12:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I spent last evening on eating, transferring music of Russian composers from tapes to WAW and on Polish. As regards the Polish part, I studied a text about the City Museum of Szczecin (which I visited in May this year, right after the meeting in Berlin), and after that I did wordlists based on my big fat green Pons German<>Polish. I also have a smaller French<->Polish dictionary, but it doesn't indicate perfective/imperfective verb pairs, and when I went through the text about the museum it didn't list half the words I tried to look up - so back to Pons, even though it is more bulky. The German publishing house Pons also has a good homepage with free crossreferenced dictionaries representing at least 16 languages - way better than a number of purely internet based dictionaries which have a tendency to crown the top of Goggle's lists if you search for dictionaries for a given language combination. Edited by Iversen on 09 October 2015 at 12:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 3958 of 3959 12 February 2016 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have written a new version of my fivepart guide to language learning. You can find it at http://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?t=2036. One decisive reason for putting it there and not here is that with language-learners' I can upload illustrations to the same site as I use for the text, but also that the general activity there has overtaken the activity here. But I still visit HTLAL regularly to see what happens here. Edited by Iversen on 12 February 2016 at 3:19pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Monox D. I-Fly Senior Member Indonesia monoxdifly.iopc.us Joined 5137 days ago 762 posts - 664 votes Speaks: Indonesian* | Message 3959 of 3959 26 September 2016 at 4:48pm | IP Logged | ||
Oh yeah, can we upload pictures in this forum? Ever since some months ago, all my flashcards failed to load here. Then why do we have the IMG tag? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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