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Mani’s language confusion in Lux. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Quabazaa Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5449 days ago 414 posts - 543 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, French Studies: Japanese, Korean, Maori, Scottish Gaelic, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Written) | Message 25 of 28 22 March 2012 at 1:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Very interesting learning more about Luxembourgish! Your poor friend being yelled at
(reminds me of the time I was about to take a plane from Switzerland -> London --> New Zealand and they first demanded my visa for England which I don't need and was in transit anyway, and then got very angry at me for not having a visa for New Zealand! Waving my passport in their face it still took them 10 minutes and calls to security to decide that I didn't need a visa for my own country *face palm*) Sounds like your French is going well and I'm impressed by how many languages you are juggling! Any advice? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4745 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 26 of 28 23 March 2012 at 11:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Seems to be the same thing everywhere you go...
Asks the one who juggles five languages the one who juggles four. ;-) Alas, I wish I could get an advice myself! Truth is, I just do what I feel I'm up to. French and Luxembourgish are easy, I'm surrounded by them. I need French though I'm not too passionate about it, but the fear of making a fool of myself is a big motivation to study and I can't expect (and don't want to) that people around me will translate for me forever. No thanks! Good thing is the more I learn the better I like French. Luxembourgish is another story. I almost got the passive skills for free, therefore I work mostly on writing and speaking and I really have to watch out that I don't fall back into German because they are so similar. Kurdish is still at the stage were everything is new, nice and lovely (and when there is such a great teaching series as Dersa Kurdî - I laughed tears watching Lesson 14 - At the doctor - you can't help but love it). Armenian? I wanted to study it for a long time but I always thought I had to stick to some plans 'bout usefulness and things the like but it kept popping up everywhere I looked (or at least I saw it everywhere) and so I finally gave in. And now I'm eagerly awaiting my book on the Armenian alphabet, because my present attempts to learn it from the Assimil course or the Internet have failed and I don't feel I can go on with Assimil without knowing the alphabet properly. *Side note* This Wednesday somehow my mind wired up several languages without me realising it at first. I was tired, hungry and grumpy because I needed for my 30 km way home about 1h 40min due to a traffic jam caused by an accident and I was listening to Luxembourgian radio as usual. News time - they aired a speech of Prime Minister Jean Claude Junker who welcomed Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands who was on state visit. He spoke first in (what I thought was) Luxembourgish and then continued in French and she thanked in French and held a little speech herself and somehow I managed to understand everything. She finished her speech the moment I parked my car, happy to be at home at last and the moment I turned off the motor I thought: Wait, didn't say Junker u*? Well, he did. That means he gave the first part of his speech in Dutch which I mixed up with Luxembourgish! I knew from experience that I could understand spoken Dutch up to 80-90% (depending on dialect of the speaker and theme) but I never thought I could mistake it for Luxembourgish... * u = polite/formal form for you in Dutch 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Quabazaa Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5449 days ago 414 posts - 543 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German, French Studies: Japanese, Korean, Maori, Scottish Gaelic, Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Egyptian), Arabic (Written) | Message 27 of 28 26 March 2012 at 3:03am | IP Logged | |||||
Yes well I just haven't been juggling very effectively lately! Uni and work are taking up a lot of my time. It's been hard to force myself to sit down and study grammar when I get home often exhausted. Thankfully mid semester break is next week! My Maori and Scots Gaelic need some attention XD Hehehe the Kurish lesson was great! What a cool resource :) Good luck with Armenian too! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mani Diglot Senior Member Germany imsprachendickicht.b Joined 4745 days ago 258 posts - 323 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Swedish, Portuguese, Latin, Welsh, Luxembourgish | Message 28 of 28 02 May 2012 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, I think it's about time for another update. I know I'm lazy with this mainly because I'm, well I feel like I'm a lazy student compared to many of you who do such a great work studying. But I'm probably just too impatient with my own abilities (I admit I'm a perfectionist and therefore I demand too much too quickly and hence I usually fail) and too easily distracted (e.g. following this great forum takes away lots of time, but it's so amusing and helpful so it can't be entirely wrong), but nonetheless if I can see my progress or not I at least know I do something language related each day.
So what have I done? To be frank for Luxembourgish hardly anything on the active side, listening to radio and TV as ever, read a bit on Wikipedia and installed the Luxbourgian keyboard as standard keyboard (although I don't think I can count that as language activity, but it's great 'cause now I can type French, Luxembourgish and German - English of course, too - without doing some stunts to get the diacritics right...) Kurdish wasn't too much either. Rewatched a couple of the Dersa Kurdî lessons and two or three new ones but as they are getting rather vocabular heavy now I think I need to work more on vocabulary. Reread the first 3 chapters of my textbook and started leaning chapter 4 vocabulary, the first two chapters seem really easy now :) and I started to print out some Wikipedia articles - mostly on geography to broaden my narrow vocab. Astonishingly I spend a lot time with French last month. Could turn out to be a good thing that the Assimil Armenian course is in French... I also listened to several podcasts (I especially like Frenchpod.com's "News in slow French" - 25 to 30 minutes simply two people talking in news style including some grammar exercise and proverbs without any knick-knack). I also finished another Dean Koontz novel and started two Agatha Christie books (inspired by Solfrid Cristin). Reading Miss Marple in French just rocks! :) Armenian - oh well... You might remember my first attemps learning the alphabet hadn't been successful, so I ordered a book on the Armenian alphabet which I was eagerly awaiting last time. Well, 1st edition is out of print, 2nd edition will be out in June or July - damn! Luckily there was a copy at my local library, it is a quite interesting little book, but I so wish they would start to use IPA when describing phonemes. For instance there are to letters transliterated as r Ր ր and Ջ ջ (though the latter is transliterated after ISO 9985 as ṙ, but why bother with that?). The explanation in my German book tells me for Ր ր: This R is spoken very soft like in Tür (just to mention it German Wiktionary gives you the IPA [tyːɐ̯] for Tür) and for Ջ ջ: the Ջ is heavily rolled like it is common in Southern German Dialects. Right... only problem is the letter R is a free allophon in German it doesn't matter whether you pronounce it [r], [ʀ] or [ʁ]. So how on earth will I know which R I shall pronounce? By the way solution is (for Eastern Armenian): pronounce Ր ր as [ɾ] and Ջ ջ as [r]. I vote for IPA plus spoken examples when introducing foreign language sounds! Otherwise I can see the differences in the alphabet by now, I'm not always right on first try but I'm getting better and what I didn't expect looking back at my first tries on the cursive it's extremely nice to write. So - all in all - still in love with it!:) Edited by Mani on 03 May 2012 at 8:55am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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