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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4545 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 17 of 92 20 August 2012 at 5:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I know it's not a popular method around here, but I personally find that translation is
not only a fun exercise, but useful in cementing a language's idiom in one's head. I'm not talking a literal translation, but a poetic rendition of the original in a new language. Keeping the meaning the same as in the original and using as many similar images as possible while still sounding natural in the new language. A challenge, a compromise - but I find it fun. Here's another Swedish song, the Frida solo version of "Fernando." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0azEiJ2S3z0&feature=plcp Varför sörjer du, Fernando? Varför klingar din gitarr i moll, vad är det som står på? (Why are you in mourning, Fernando? Why are you plucking minor chords on your guitar, what's the cause of this?) Är det kärleken, Fernando? Har hon lämnat dig, din stora stora kärlek, är det så? Den som älskat och förlorat - vett att sånt kan ändå hända då och då (Is it love, Fernando? Has she left you, your great, great love, is that it? That which loved and lost - know that such can happen now and then) Sorgen kan va' tung att bära Men att vänner sviker är någonting man måste lära sig (Sadness can be hard to bear but in this life, you must learn that you will lose friends) Jag har också mist min kära Vem är du som tror att detta kunde drabba bara dig? Har du några glada sånger kvar, så spela spela spela dem för mig (I have also lost my love Who are you to think that such a thing has only affected you? If you've any happy songs to play, then play them play them play them for me) Länge länge leve kärleken vår bästa vän, Fernando Fyll ditt glas och höj en skål för den for kärleken, Fernando Spela spela melodin och sjung sånger om lyckan Länge länge leve kärleken, den kärleken, Fernando (Long, long live love, our best friend, Fernando Fill the glass and say a cheer for it, for love, Fernando Play that, play that melody and sing songs about joy long, long live love, that love, Fernando) *Ska vi skåla för dem andra? Som fick evig kärlek och dem trom som bor i varje sång? (Should we cheer for those others, those who got eternal love and those who live within our song?) **Eller skåla med varandra Vill du dricka för den lycka som jag upplevde en gång? Det är lika sant som sagt den vackra sagar den blir aldrig, aldrig lång (Or will we cheer with the others? Will you drink for the happiness I once experienced? It is also true as said that beautiful stories they never, ever last) Verses * and ** I had trouble translating. If someone could verify if I got the gist right, I would be very grateful. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 18 of 92 20 August 2012 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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@pbromide:
Sorry to interrupt your log again, but that point about delaying writing down the meaning of a word is better explained in Iversen's own language learning guide, in part 3 which deals with vocabulary learning: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=16956&PN=1&TPN=1 Part 1 starts here: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=16932 Definitely worth reading if you haven't already done so. He's recently added a 5th part. There are links to the other parts in any one part. (Remove any blank characters in the links) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4545 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 19 of 92 21 August 2012 at 1:33am | IP Logged | ||
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It is no problem at all - posts with advice or corrections or whatever are welcome
here! I admit they make me feel less alone. I'll definitely read about the word lists. I have a story to tell today. Somewhat Swedish related, somewhat not, but it was Swedish that triggered this, so I feel it is appropriate to share here. It's a little bit of history about a very famous Swedish band, you've probably heard of them - ABBA. ABBA is known for its English songs, but they did do a few Swedish songs. How many? Officially, there are four ABBA songs recorded in Swedish that were officially released as ABBA songs: Ring Ring, Åh! Vilka Tider, Waterloo, and Honey Honey. There are a few "proto-ABBA" recordings that feature all four members on vocals, some of which were included as "ABBA" works ("Hej Gamle Man") and some that are just collaborations on solo works ("Dröm är Dröm och Saga Saga"). There are two ABBA songs that were recorded as solo records by their respective lead singers, "S.O.S." and "Fernando," and received accompanying Swedish translations. There are also several unreleased ABBA songs in Swedish, perhaps the two most well known being "Hovas Vittne" and "Sång Till Görel." For a very long time, I thought that this was it. Were someone to ask me how many Swedish ABBA songs there were, I would qualify my answer as saying "officially released as ABBA, four. Six if you count the solo records made with the original backing tracks, nine if you include unreleased tracks, and depending on what the pre- ABBA careers count as it's a whole 'nother ball game." This all changed when I discovered that a friend of ABBA and fellow artist, Lena Andersson, did a Swedish version of "Hasta Mañana." I was happy - more Swedish! and decided to see if there was some sort of list of ABBA-sponsored artists that had performed any of their songs in Swedish. Dear Lord, were there. I stayed up until three o' clock looking for "ABBA på svenska" and I found at least 23 different versions of ABBA songs in Swedish by artists both ABBA-endorsed and just plain random. I have managed to obtain lyrics for only nine of these. Most of these songs have not been released on CD as far as I know, so finding recordings for any of them (and don't even ask about the lyrics) was difficult. To further complicate the matter, there is also "Mamma Mia! På Svenska," which is a Swedish version of the jukebox musical. The songs here have entirely different lyrics than their original Swedish counterparts, probably because the original Swedish translations took a lot of liberties with the subject matter and ended up having little to do with the original song. So we have two versions of "Mamma Mia," two versions of "The Winner Takes It All," two versions of "Honey Honey"... you get the idea. The good news is that now I have that much more Swedish vocabulary that I can hum to myself with immediately catchy tunes. The bad news is I'm very tired from staying up so late and so today I did absolutely no Swedish study. Bad me, I know. But I did it for Sweden. For ABBA. For the Dancing Queen. Speaking of which, I was disappointed that the only Swedish version of Dancing Queen that I could find was the Mamma Mia! version. I suppose even in the 70s, Swedes got tired of hearing that song real fast. And so ends this long list of information about ABBA and Swedish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4545 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 20 of 92 21 August 2012 at 7:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Någonting som plågar mig är att jag kan inte lära hiragana. Jag kunde lära mig ryska
alfabetet, men inte hiragana. Så jag skrivde texten av sången "Sakura" (さくら) många gånger tills lärade jag mig många hiragana. Jag använde den här sajt för att hjälpa mig minna karaktärerna. Succéen är min för jag lärade olika karaktärer som jag inte visste innan. Jag vill inte lära mig japansku just nu, men en dag i framtiden vill jag lära mig, även en lite. Så det är viktig att jag lära det. Jag känner mig väl för jag trodde att jag kunde lära mig hiragana, att det var alltför svårt. Jag är glad att se att jag kan ändå lära nya alfabeter. No Swedish whatsoever today, but I had a strong urge to study hiragana. I've studied them on and off before, but for some reason have never been able to learn them completely. I learned many more today using my far-fetched mnemonics system, and I actually feel that I can learn them all. I have a tendency to overestimate or underestimate my abilities, and when it comes to alphabets that don't look related to the Latin one, I feel intimidated (Cyrillic already had a lot of related characters, so I thought it was fun and cool to learn it. Hiragana is more of a pain and I don't want to talk about Devanagari). Someday, when I decide to learn Japanese, I'll be a bit more prepared. But for now I'm really enjoying myself with Swedish. Studying Swedish has made me much happier and feel more accomplished. Language therapy - a new technique for the future? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 21 of 92 21 August 2012 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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@Pbromide: re: Abba, etc: It's always fascinating to dig back into the history of
something that really interests us, and it's always more complicated (and usually interesting) than the "headline version". I've done similar for some of my pop and rock heroes, and other things. And Abba were (and are) so cool! And it's a great way of getting into your TL - in fact I look at it the other way - it's a reason to learn your TL better if there are great songs sung in it. English wouldn't be so popular if English-language pop songs were all terrible :-) (Well, most of them are terrible nowadays, but that's another thread :-) ). But quickly another pop-language related story: It was indirectly the band a-ha that got me studying Norwegian! Our daughter was always a big fan, and after a while, we became fans as well, and when they (sadly) announced their retirement, we managed to get tickets for their last London gig and their 2nd-last Oslo gig. This was about a year in advance (and the tickets sold out within hours!), and we planned a trip to Oslo (via Copenhagen, and Ystad for other reasons...), and that's when I bought my TYS Norwegian. The rest is history...as it were. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4857 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 22 of 92 21 August 2012 at 6:16pm | IP Logged | ||
Swedish, Swedish... I've fallen in love with music played by Radio P3. I can wholeheartedly recommend it.
Amazing! :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4545 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 23 of 92 21 August 2012 at 11:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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@montmorency - It's always good to find a fellow fan of Scandinavian pop. I only know
A-ha's big hit "Take On Me," but I've been told they did a lot of good songs. There was actually a discussion on the Wikipedia page about whether "Take On Me" was a literal interpretation of the phrase "ta på mig" (well, its Norwegian equivalent). I don't know if this was done on purpose or just a cool accident, but thanks to that song I've never forgotten that idiom. @prz_ - Being that I want to major in linguistics (and I'll probably have to minor in something else), I thought about a job as a speech pathologist for children with autism. Or actually just working with children and people with autism in general. I know music therapy is a thing now. I'm interested in looking at autism from a linguistic perspective, as a condition that is not only neurological but linguistic. I once found an interesting but short article about autism from a linguist's perspective, and I was really happy to have found it because I thought nobody was really doing research of that type. Jag gjorde inte många svenska idag. Det var, hur sången går, "en ledig dag." Jag gick till affären for att se datorna och tableter för skolan. Men jag tänk att jag ska bara använda penna och papper! Jag gillar tableter med en penna för att skriva med - jag hatar skriva med mitt finger eller ett virtuelt tangentbord. Men trenden nu är att inte använda pennar av någon typ, även när man behöver skriva. Om jag kan inte skriva med ett verkligt tangentbord eller en penna, jag vill inte ha det. Skolan börjar mondag. Jag måste arbeta lite mer svårt på svenska eftersom när skolan börjar, jag ska inte ha tiden. Så måste jag se och granska mina nya ord från ABBA sångerna. En utveckling: jag har lärat nya karaktärer i japanska. Jag är väldigt glad. Men efter ska jag behöver lära katakana...! Och jag vill inte tala om kanji. Men jag lovade mig att en dag jag skulle studera japanska, och jag ska göra det. Möjligen inte nu, men i nära framtiden. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pbromide Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4545 days ago 76 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, French Studies: Russian, Swedish | Message 24 of 92 22 August 2012 at 5:53am | IP Logged | ||
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Jag har en problem - jag kan inte minna alla ord som jag skriver. Enligt min SRS, jag
har 164. Jag skulle veta 164 ord, rätt? Fel. Jag glömmer nya ord väldigt snabbt. Men jag har en idé... jag ska ta bort många gamla ord och lägga dem igen, så jag kan ha praktik. Också ska jag gör en word list à la Iverson. Dessutom, om jag visste 164 ord, det skulle vara bra. Jag ska koncentrera mig på lära väll dessa ord. Speaking of which, I should also do this with Russian... well, I'll do it once classes start. Right now I'm just having fun with Swedish. Serious business with Russian will come later. Still, it's nice to know that I've refined my technique a little from the days when I studied Russian by writing the same word multiple times and then Googling it to find an example of a sentence. I have something like 280 words in my SRS for Russian. While it's disheartening to know I probably don't know all of these, it's nice that I don't have to scour the internet looking for new words. I have these old words, with sentences, that I can just learn better. Then when I add new words, I'll repeat the whole process en masse. We'll see how that works. I believe there's a study saying that you are more likely to remember something if you remember it after having a lot of trouble remembering it. Your brain marks the information as "important" and so the next time it will be easier for you to remember it. If you just take the easy way out and use a dictionary or something to remind yourself, you are less likely to learn the information. In addition, the environment in which you learn the information and the emotional state in which you are while learning the information also has an effect on recall. If you learn the different isomers of a molecule while you're angry, drunk, or drinking cola, you are more likely to remember that information if you are, respectively, angry, drunk, or drinking cola. Not sure how to apply this to language use. I'll take a look at an old psychology textbook I have one of these days and see if there are any other interesting tidbits about memory that could prove useful. UPDATE: Spent an hour copying down 156 words from my SRS to make into a wordlist. I copied even the ones I knew really well because I didn't want to overestimate my own abilities. Plus, it reminds me that I know a few words. Speaking of words, I did a rough estimate of how many words I know in Swedish. For passive recognition, I have ~2000. What does this tell my about my ability in this language? Well, I can understand the structure of the language. I read and I'm not totally lost. I can get the gist of what's going on. This gist, however, is very vague, and don't even think about asking me to relay details. 2000 words can get you by in a language, but I wouldn't feel comfortable saying "I speak Swedish" with only 2000 words in my passive recognition. Clearly a lot more studying of vocabulary is needed if I ever want to get anywhere. This goes for any language I plan to study or have studied, Russian included. (French, I get a huge discount because of Spanish, so I can afford to be a little lazy) Edited by pbromide on 22 August 2012 at 7:01am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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