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PaulLambeth’s TAC 2012: Team ɬ | ||
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| PaulLambeth Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5376 days ago 244 posts - 315 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Hindi, Irish | Message 1 of 16 26 October 2011 at 2:17am | IP Logged |
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This will now be dedicated to the TAC 2012. First post on it on page 2, message 10.
Hi all. There are a few languages I'm concentrating on right now, all of which will have differing (but existing) levels of use to me in the next few years. The main ones are: Icelandic I live in Iceland, and although in Reykjavík there's the immersion problem that everyone here speaks brilliant English and I'm having my classes in English (thus, all my friends are English), I am getting some practise in at the stores. Icelanders are always happy to hear a foreigner speaking their language. I want to keep my vocabulary and phrase acquisition up by posting here every couple of days. My Icelandic I want to go from lower conversational to a more comfortable level. Hindi I hope to visit India soon, so I'm investing some time into learning Hindi. I wish to learn the Devanagari script and reach a basic conversational level before travelling there. I do realise my native English will help, but there will be situations where English won't be very well understood and it'd be great to have Hindi to fall back on. One of the areas I might be going to is actually Tamil-speaking, but I'll look at that hurdle when I get to it; Hindi is useful as the lingua-franca for most of the country. Others that I'll be dipping into: Tok Pisin Apart from being an interesting language for an English speaker to pick (and, by way of its similarity, simultaneously cute), I'd love to visit Melanesia. Dzongkha The feasability of this one depends on whether or not I'll be able to find any resources of significance and whether or not I'm actually going to Bhutan. It's not decided yet; same with India, mind, but India's definitely on my list for the future even if it's not within this year. It seems to be ridiculously understudied, given that it's Bhutan's national language. Irish Now and then. I'm definitely going back to the Gaeltacht, no doubt. I can pronounce a lot of Irish, but I'd like to develop beyond that. --- My resources: Icelandic The people and city around me, which is a fantastic resource. I'm no longer looking at coursebooks, as they won't help me much. I do have some Icelandic-language books, namely: 'Uppspuni' (A Lie), a collection of short stories; 'A Vegum Úti' (On The Road, by Jack Kerouac, with its English counterpart), a classic Beat-era novel translated into Icelandic; and 'Englar Alheimsins' (Angels of the Universe), a classic Icelandic book that's been turned into an equally good film. Hindi I have a group of CDs called 'Teach Yourself Hindi Conversation' with the roman transliteration, rented out from the library, for pronunciation. I have started on a couple of PDF files to learn the script, and the book 'Teach Yourself - Get Started In Hindi' (sans CD, unfortunately) for some progress, which usefully has the script matched with the transliteration the whole way through. For later, I have 'GCSE Hindi', originally published back when Hindi was available at some UK schools, which is a little more advanced and is crucially all in Devanagari. Tok Pisin There is a PDF on the Wikipedia page for the language which outlines the grammar with exercises while building a lexicon pretty quickly (well, not that quickly considering how similar most of it is to English). I can't hope for much more than this and some updated vocabulary. I've seen that there's a copy of the Bible in Tok Pisin, which I'll try and get hold of. I'll hunt for audio recordings. Dzongkha Literally just a Dz-En online dictionary, with VERY few words. I'll keep hunting but fortunately this isn't a priority right now. Irish I have Mícheál Ó Siadhail's 'Learning Irish', Nollaig Mac Congail's 'Irish Grammar Book' and plenty of Clannad and Altan to get me through my doodling. I might forget to update these as I gather more resources, so check later on to see if there's any addition. --- Hérna... Eins og sagt var, ég bý í Reykjavík, höfuðborg Íslands, sem skiptinemi í landfræði við Háskóla Íslands. Ég á heima í Vesturbæ, sem er fyrir vestan Miðbæinn og fyrir norðan háskólann. Allsstaðar (svo til) getur maður séð Hallgrímsskirkju, sem stendur há á hæsta hólnum Reykjavíkur. Og sjórinn er alltaf fyrir norðan þig. Þess vegna er ekki hægt að verða vegavilltur (nema maður sé í byggingu ... og maður er oft í byggingum, því er það komið október og er pínu kalt úti!). Gleymdi að segja: ef maður sem skilur íslensku sér þessa síðu og vill leiðrétta mig, hann á að gjöra svo vel og gera það! Ég er hérna til að læra (og slappa af). The same goes for all of my languages, as I start writing in them. If you see anything that should be corrected, please go ahead and do so, as I'm here to learn (as well as slack off). Takk! Shukriyaa! Tenkyu! Kadinchey! Go raibh maith agat! Edited by PaulLambeth on 27 December 2011 at 12:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| PaulLambeth Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5376 days ago 244 posts - 315 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Hindi, Irish | Message 2 of 16 29 October 2011 at 1:31pm | IP Logged |
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Icelandic
Í gærkvöld sat ég í kaffihúsinu 'Babalú' á Skólavörðustíg, við Hallgrímskirkju (framvegis er hún kölluð bara 'kirkjan'). Ég ætlaði að byrja að vinna, en allt í einu kom þýskuspjall á milli tveggja þjóðverja sem höfðu ekki hitt áður. Ég skildi mikið! Í fyrra (það varð búið í maí þetta ár) hafði ég námskeið í þýsku. Svo kom íslenska vinkona eins þjóðverja, sem heilsaði okkur á íslensku. Ég og annar þjóðverji spurðum líka á íslensku og við byrjuðum að spjalla, því miður bara í nokkrar mínútur. Summary: we chatted for a couple of minutes in Icelandic. And the German bit below. German Okay, so some of that above was German practise - as in, I understood some. A couple of Germans who'd just met started speaking to each other across me in the café, and I understood most of what was said. I let that known only when one of the girl's Icelandic friends came though, because I wasn't confident enough to join in with the conversation. Hindi I'm through to chapter 3 of Teach Yourself Beginners' Hindi, although I keep working back through the first few pages to cement it. I'm going to start learning the sound of the word (for example, kitaab - book) along with the Devanaagarii version so that I learn how to recognise the words in the exercises easily, and so I can move on from just reading the Roman transliteration quickly. I haven't done script-work in a long time and I need to get into it. However, that can wait a few days until a presentation and two essays are done! I have a question: In Hindi, the stress of the word seems to be scattered. I read in a PDF course that I've been working on for the script that stress is placed on the 'e' of 'namaste' because 'e' is considered the only long vowel (the 'a' is a schwa, so it makes sense that it's not considered long). In the name of the script, am I correct in assuming that the two longer vowels are where one places the stress, as in 'DevanAAgarII'? Are there any firm rules for the stressing of syllables, or is it something I have to learn word-for-word? Edited by PaulLambeth on 29 October 2011 at 1:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| PaulLambeth Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5376 days ago 244 posts - 315 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Hindi, Irish | Message 3 of 16 30 October 2011 at 2:06am | IP Logged |
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Hindi
I've started to do as I said in the post above. I wrote in Devanaagarii all the vocabulary from the glossary of Chapter 1 in 'Get Started in Hindi', along with all the exercises, and began chapter 2 in a similar fashion. The words for teacher and student are giving me pains with writing and partially pronunciation, due to their conjuncts and aspirated consonants followed by य (ya). I'm picking up a lot of words this way, so I'm sure to continue. It seems to help to have something more involving than just the sound of the word to focus on. Every time I approach the word I write it out in the script, giving me more confidence with the script. These transparent whiteboards I invested in are paying off well. I also downloaded the Anki vocabulary list from Teach Yourself Hindi (a book I think I don't have; mine is the Get Started version from the same author), but knowing that that's far too much new vocabulary to be looking at so quickly, I've started another Anki list of a combination of words in this book and things I'm finding from Wikipedia (English version for a while yet). It's mainly food-related so far. It's nice being a Brit and being able to read, from the correct script and with a slightly more trained accent, words like 'saag' and 'murgh tikka' that appear on Indian restaurant menus all over the UK. I have another question about Hindi (they're gonna keep coming): in a word like टिक्का, does the conjunct क्क create a glottal stop, or do anything else to the pronunciation, compared to the hypothetical word टिका? I've got to start using the Hindi keyboard more. This is hard work when I can't see the letters. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| PaulLambeth Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5376 days ago 244 posts - 315 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Hindi, Irish | Message 4 of 16 02 November 2011 at 4:36pm | IP Logged |
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Right now I have another essay to hand in after the one that was done for yesterday, so I haven't been able to get much language learning in. Shame, because the November 6WC has started (I'm learning Hindi, with an amazing 25 minutes in 2 days!).
Irish Surprised myself with how much I remember of Irish pronunciation and vocabulary by going through some audio files. I might bring my Micheal O Siadhail's Irish book with me when I feel like procrastinating for my essay. Anyway, I count this as 25 minutes towards the 6WC, just in another language, so I've logged it as such. Hindi Internet Polyglot is a great website for audio recordings, along with being sort of a deeper phrasebook split into categories. Very handy for improving my pronunciation; I'll do a lot more work on that once I'm freer. Now to work on becoming freer. Edited by PaulLambeth on 02 November 2011 at 4:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| PaulLambeth Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5376 days ago 244 posts - 315 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Hindi, Irish | Message 5 of 16 04 November 2011 at 7:15pm | IP Logged |
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Hindi
I did two hours of Hindi today and a tiny bit yesterday for a break from my essay. Gone through chapter 2 and most of chapter 3 of Teach Yourself, learning post-positions, their use, and getting more fluent with the script and the conjugation of 'to be'. I've taken notice of what Glossika says in his video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAdyAa4oHDA - about sentence mining, and its use. I also just watched his videos on attempting to learn 18 indigenous Taiwanese languages in 4 months (which should be nearly up ...) and was amazed by how much appears to be based upon sentence mining. I'm additionally amazed by how many of those sentences it is. No way will I be able to do it as consistently as him, but I'll try. I'll leave it for a while though, until I have the structure of Hindi down. Today I plan to do at least another hour of Hindi writing, perhaps finishing Chapter 3 or even just going through a phrasebook, and listening to a CD for a while in addition. It's my 6-week challenge language so I want to concentrate on it. Irish I took note of what I said 2 days ago about Irish. I love the sound of it and I seem to be able to pick it up much quicker than Hindi, even though it's a more remote language. I'm looking forward to the first time I get to use the phrase "Tá seomraí go leor anseo!" - "There's rooms galore here!". I went through lessons 2 and 3 of Learning Irish quite thoroughly, and I plan to do 2 lessons (either a fast recap of the previous two and then one, or just two anew) every couple of days. I've noticed that the Irish taught in Learning Irish is a bit different from that taught on Eoin Bitesize (I get emails from them occasionally, although I've not bought a subscription). For example, in Eoin, the word 'oíche' is pronounced with a schwa at the end, but in Learning Irish (Co. Galway Irish) it's pronounced just 'i:'. There's a couple of other vowel drops, and a final 'igh' is pronounced 'id' (a hard d) on that website. A philological aside: I'm noticing some comparison between Irish and English. I know that galore (go leor, pronounced the same) is from Old Irish. Obviously uncle (uncail) isn't - pronunciation even maintains the nasalised n - and likewise picture (peictiúr) and paper (páipéar). Feilméara looked close to English, but not quite close enough to make me think it's a direct borrowing like peictiúr, and I knew farmer didn't have a Germanic root, so I got excited. I've just found out it's French (from ferme), though, and the other dialects' words for it are feirmeoir (Munster) and farmóir (Ulster). Excitement burst. I'll keep an eye out for more cognates. Hopefully a few more will be English words based on Irish, rather than the other way round. 2 chapters every 2 days. Maybe I can use it when I next visit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| PaulLambeth Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5376 days ago 244 posts - 315 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Hindi, Irish | Message 6 of 16 05 November 2011 at 6:57am | IP Logged |
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Hindi
Instead of my hour of Hindi writing I decided to straight up listen to the audio, without the booklet (I've sort of lost it, which helped a lot with the helpfulness of this session), writing everything down in the script along with an attempt at spelling any new words (mostly names), while shadowing a few of the phrases. I went through two conversations in about an hour and a half, and I can count this as listening, speaking and writing practise. It's a great method, especially when keeping my pronunciation in check. Icelandic I then went to my friend's house to watch Monty Python, and got reacquainted with Colloquial Icelandic, which I'd lent to him. He's not really using it anymore and while flicking through I realised how näive I'd been to think that I wouldn't need to practise in Iceland, and that occasional conversation would bring my level up much without additional revision. Plus, apart from my grammar being very good, I'm lacking in a lot of places, including good conversational vocabulary. As a result I've not really progressed at all in Icelandic in 2 months here. So I'm going to try Glossika's sentence mining method (described above) for Icelandic. I spent a couple of hours finding and manipulating 66 sentences out of books (Colloquial Icelandic, Englar Alheimsins, Uppspuni and Á Vegum Úti; the latter is Jack Kerouac translated, so not exactly suitable for this, although great for slang). This isn't a fast enough method, partially because I was specifically looking for sentences containing one or two underused or new words, and of a tiny bit of length. I'm going to search through Mál og Menning (great bookstore), where I know they have a section on Icelandic learning, to see if there's any books. If not, going through the Wisconsin dictionary (which contains example sentences) or just looking at Wikipedia/the news might give me more. I'll be putting videos up on Youtube of the sentences, in case it's handy to anybody, and also so to give my practise a goal. Irish Just now I finished chapter 4 of Learning Irish. I love this book's style - it might be a large reason that I'm growing more comfortable in Irish so much faster than Hindi, despite only really starting Irish properly (besides pronunciation) yesterday and today. Dabbling a year ago doesn't really count. Every chapter is a few pages long and mostly texts and translation exercises, with a clear (quite large) list of new vocabulary on the left. The exercises test you on this vocabulary mainly, but tend to pick on a few words at a time so that the words are at least practised a bit. With Teach Yourself Hindi, on the other hand, I find that I'm spending far too long looking up vocabulary. There are also just not enough exercises in the Hindi book. I'm looking forward to building up enough so that I can go through GCSE Hindi, which is entirely in Devanagari script (besides English translations) and has entire pages on reading and writing (and listening, speaking - intended with the aid of a teacher - and vocabulary). I also have another PDF in a similar style. --- 12 hours hit in the 6 Week Challenge, mostly from today, which includes the previous post. I'm pretty pleased with that! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| PaulLambeth Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5376 days ago 244 posts - 315 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Hindi, Irish | Message 7 of 16 10 November 2011 at 9:49pm | IP Logged |
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I'm back from a few days off doing essays. I've slipped right down the 6 Week Challenge table so I'm aiming to put myself up to 30 hours by tonight, from over 24. Quite realistic.
Irish I'm more into this than I thought. Now up to lesson 7 of Learning Irish, and I've gone back through half of them to recap. I might put up a video of me pronouncing Irish soon, just to see if I'm doing it right. I've modified how I pronounce it from the book, because I've noticed (as mentioned above) that they drop some syllables in the dialect I'm learning that they don't in others. Anyway, it's continuing ahead. Tonight's plan is to finish back through all the texts and exercises until lesson 7, so that I've done them all twice. Hindi I'm continuing through Teach Yourself but also going through the stories and PDF files I've downloaded, writing and trying to read in the script, and doing audio drills. My aim for tonight is to do more audio drills and go back through the book, like in Irish, over the old exercises. My vocabulary retention in Hindi is not improving, so I'm just going to try hammering it home. Icelandic I managed to stay in Icelandic in a conversation yesterday without any stammering, which is rare for me, and I understood everything. I went through and quickly read aloud some dialogues in Colloquial Icelandic and listened to the radio a tiny bit. My sentence collecting has now hit about 250 sentences but I haven't updated that in a few days. I'll aim to spend at least an hour collecting more tonight. Tok Pisin I did 10 minutes or so of reading sentence structures, just to retain them. It's very easy to maintain some passive knowledge of the function words just by seeing them in sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| PaulLambeth Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5376 days ago 244 posts - 315 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Hindi, Irish | Message 8 of 16 12 November 2011 at 12:02am | IP Logged |
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Irish
I've gone back through all of them now - I was only up to lesson 6 - and I've posted a video of me reading some of the Irish out from Learning Irish (click here) lesson 4. I've gone through the library and found the Teach Yourself Irish 1980s copy, which teaches Munster Irish. For that reason, I'm going to keep going through Learning Irish until I'm confident with the Cois Fhairrge spellings of the beginning of TYI. Hindi I'm not going as far with this right now, but I've done more audio drills, and learnt some more words, going over the old exercises again. The library (national library of Iceland) has surprisingly fewer resources for Hindi than for Irish and Scottish Gaelic, and as a result I've not managed to find any more resources for Hindi to ease myself into it. I'm looking for others because, even though this Teach Yourself is better than all the other recent ones that I've tried, it's still not what I want. For a start, the Devanaagarii script is written ALWAYS next to the romanised script, throughout the book - not handy at all as I'm trying to learn to read it without relying on the romanised - and the English translations are often on the same page. There's also not enough translation and reading exercises. There are smaller things: the vocabulary lists aren't on clearly located pages, and the book is just awkward to hold and keep open as it's too tightly bound. Everything that Teach Yourself Hindi is not, Learning Irish is. That's why I think I might try and translate the exercises in Learning Irish into Hindi. Icelandic One thing that the national library of Iceland has in abundance is Icelandic books. I don't know why I didn't think of looking in the language section until just now; lo and behold, I've found 4 fairly recently written (past 1970s) beginners' readers and usage books, and there's plenty more. I'm still gathering sentences and now have over 300, with plenty of new resources for them. Welsh A tiny flit of wanderlust, mainly to learn how to pronounce Welsh. As soon as I got into the learning of words I decided to stop as I already have two new languages running around my head that barely have any basis. Don't want to confuse it with a third. --- In the library I've also found a whole host of wanderlust materials. West Greenlandic has a reasonable section, as does Northern Sámi (books only in Swedish but I can read it okay), Scottish Gaelic and Welsh as said, and POSSIBLY Angloromani. 33 hours logged on the 6-week challenge now. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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