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| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5260 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 817 of 1317 15 December 2013 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Sorry, emk. I should have noticed that there was no ISBN- a dead giveaway! I apologize. This beggars the question of why someone would go to all the time and trouble to to do this, to create the book, and then not bother to share it with the wider world.
Edit:Details of the Little Prince Ancient Egyptian sumary translation Apparently only 40 copies exist. They must be circulating among the small field of Ancient Egyptian linguists, or the tiny subset of collectors who want to collect the book in all extant translated versions, crazy! 
Nesu-sa-rejes  Edited by iguanamon on 15 December 2013 at 3:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4531 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 818 of 1317 15 December 2013 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
My aim is to be able to sit down and read and comfortably be able to enjoy a German newspaper at an equivalent written level to something like the New York Times. But thinking about it, when I am tried I don't even want to read the New York Times. So perhaps when you are tired all languages are hard. I think it's interesting that our two dream goals - speaking vs reading - mirror how you put much more effort into speaking in your L2 than I. Edited by patrickwilken on 15 December 2013 at 4:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 819 of 1317 15 December 2013 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Forgiven! But you shouldn't tease me like that.
Hmm. That actually reads nsw sA nDs, "King (of Upper Egypt) son little", which is plausible enough as a title. But looking at the book cover: 1. Can nsw really refer to a generic foreign king? It contains a fairly specific geographical reference to Upper Egypt. 2. The title of the book is drawn with the signs facing in a direction opposite all the other signs. Sloppy. 3. The name is in a cartouche, which means it's a royal name. Fair enough; we are talking about a prince. 4. Before the cartouche, I see a hand drawn sA-ra "son of Ra", indicating that this is the name of the Little Prince in his aspect as the son of Ra (as opposed to his nsw-bity name, in his aspect as the king of Upper and Lower Egypt). Has someone gotten a little carried away with royal Egyptian titles here? Anyway, there may be perfectly good justifications for all of these decisions. I'm a total n00b at Egyptian. But glancing at the cover, this strikes me as possibly a less careful translation than the British Museum's version of Peter Rabbit.
I suspect anglophone students of French have an unfair advantage here. French newspapers use lots and lots of English cognates, which means they're fairly easy to read. Sure, there may be a couple of unfamiliar words and perhaps a strange turn of phrase, but I have no problem casually reading the newspaper.
Keep in mind that I speak French with my wife, and have done so for the last 22 months. This places a huge demand on my speaking skills: If my wife comes home from work and she wants to talk about taxes, we use French. If we go to a play, we talk about it afterwards in French. So on one level, my French is pretty good. But it's rarely as good as I'd like it to be—I still often find myself reduced to incoherent babbling or hunting for words. When I talk about wanting to discuss complicated things in French on insufficient sleep after a long day of work, it's not because I'm a perfectionist. It's because that actually happens to me on a regular basis. :-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| csidler Diglot Pro Member Australia chadsidler.com Joined 4821 days ago 51 posts - 59 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, French Personal Language Map | Message 820 of 1317 15 December 2013 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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So what is the plan for 2014?
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| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 821 of 1317 16 December 2013 at 5:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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s-Dd.t n(y) ptr sXat, page 2
Today we have pages 2 & 3 of Peter Rabbit. These look a bit harder than page 1! This time, I decided to brush of my typesetting skills, so I used JSesh and the popular Manuel de codage format for specifying hieroglyphs.
So far, I can only get scatted words here and there, and I can't hook up the grammar. Line 1 HD-ra:n-r:f-tA:1*N23-D&d-n-s-X:a-t:wn-i-A&t-A19-B1 HD-ra:n-r:f-tA:1*N23 Dd n sXat iAt ??? / say / to? of? / rabbit / old woman That first part is pretty opaque, and I don't know what the preposition is doing here. Line 2 i-A2-U7:r-w-tyw-A1*B2:1*1*1-B1-D37-B1-N40-m-D54-t:n:1*1*1 i-A2-U7:r-w-tyw-A1*B2:1*1*1-B1-D37-B1 Sm tn ??? / go / you (plural) Line 3 r-M8:N23*3-r-N31:t*1-t:n-r:1-p-w-i-m-D35-t:n:1*1*1 r SA.w r wA.t tn r:1-p-w-i-m-D35-t:n:1*1*1 to / fields / to / road / (the?) / ??? something with a negation ??? Line 4 sw-w&t-N40-m-D54-r-S:1-n-G39&1-g:r-g-V4:r-A1 swt sm r S n(y) sA grgor however? / go / to / garden / of / son Gregor Line 5 I'm feeling lazy right now. Line 6 i-m-r:D37-n-sw-w-N41:t-B1-G39&1-g:r-g-V4:r-A1 im rdi n? sw Hmt sA grgor in-it / put / to? of? / him / wife / son Gregor Line 7 m-t:X2-X4:1*1*1-s-r:f-Q7 m t srf in / bread / warm Why is it harder this time? This page was a bad choice for several reasons: 1. It's too long and too complicated, which makes it much harder to align things. 2. It involves quoted speech. 3. There are weird verb forms: negative imperatives, giving permission. I should really just skip pages like this, and stick to short pages with simple sentences. :-) At this level, it really helps to have short, fully annotated texts with literal translations and footnotes, because I'm just drowning here, and I'm not working efficiently. Looking up 2 out of every 3 words in the dictionary is a waste of time: I'd learn just as much if somebody had already looked up the words for me, and I could learn 10x faster. This is what I love about Assimil: It allows me to play this same "decipherment" game, but with a vastly better cheat sheet, and with texts that gradually increase in difficulty.
Finish my statistics class in French. After that, no particular plan. I generally try to avoid making New Years resolutions. 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 822 of 1317 16 December 2013 at 10:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
But in an environment like that (assuming you could remain in French almost all the time, and not be part of an ex-pat enclave), you'd almost certainly be improving all the time, and therefore coping better all the time. And for 500-page reading assignments, you'd almost certainly develop and improve on your "reading for gist" skills that you already have. And/or you would develop coping strategies like charming your fellow-students for their notes on the (apparently) incomprehensible lecture. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 823 of 1317 16 December 2013 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Absolutely. And yes, I survived university once (in English), and so I know all about checking syllabuses, finding a nice mix of hard and easy courses, and figuring out which friends take awesome notes. :-) But my point is that my level is just high enough to survive in theory, but low enough to be a major complicating factor in practice. My language-learning strategy has always been "create an environment where more advanced skills are necessary, and muddle through until my brain gets the memo." The only drawback with this strategy is that it's hard to create a need for advanced speaking skills without actually being immersed in a socially and intellectually demanding environment. OTOH, I think I'd escape my speaking plateau very quickly in a full professional and social immersion situation. Even a weekend among French speakers tends to make a big difference. Line 5 ir:n-t-Z7 s-t:U30-A-Z7-V2:D54-Aa2:1*1*1-r-i-t:f-A1-t:n:1*1*1 ir(ntw?) stA(w?) Aa2:1*1*1 r it tn make/do+verb stuff? / enter? extract?+verb stuff? / ??? / preposition? / father / your There's clearly some idiomatic verb thing going on at the start of this line. I have no idea what the Aa2:1*1*1 is doing there; it seems unlikely to be an ideogram for "pustules, glands". This gives me:
So it's not totally opaque, given a few hours and a good dictionary. :-) But I clearly need to focus on the easier pages of the book, and I desperately need to: 1. Learn more of the verb system. 2. Build up my stock of basic idioms. 3. Find more Egyptian texts with hyper-literal translations and annotations. Basically, my Egyptian skills are so rudimentary that I can't get enough sheer volume for natural language acquisition to help me. And this is why I don't necessarily use many native materials early on—I'd rather be spoonfed useful examples until I get up to 75% comprehension or so. Of course, if you give me an Spanish text with a translation, I'm already above that bar without any study. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5164 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 824 of 1317 16 December 2013 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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It's nice to see that you have a similar opinion when it comes to native materials too
early, emk. Looking up 2 out of 3 words just seems like an unnecessary waste of time that could be better employed at studying other aspects. That's why I also tend to stick to translation and even Assimil's literal translation until they become obvious. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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