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| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5554 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 217 of 1317 27 August 2012 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Très romantique! :)
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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 218 of 1317 28 August 2012 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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30 Days of Egyptian: A Retrospective
First, here's what I've been up to: - I spent 40 days using Anki to learn 200 basic signs suggested by Akkadboy. This involved about 1,200 reps over the course of 8 total hours, according to Anki's charts. - I've spent 29 days doing one lesson a day from Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique. Along the way, I entered 95% of the lessons and exercises into Assimil. So the official experiment actually finishes tomorrow, but I'm going to write it up one day early. There's a lot of stuff here about Assimil, Anki and ideographic/dead/non- Indo-European languages. Feel free to skim for the section headings which interest you— this is a long post. But there will be hieroglyphs! Learning the characters first. Khatzumoto, the author of the "All Japanese All The Time" site, has always recommended leaning the kanji before using Anki to study and review sentences. While I was waiting for my Assimil book to arrive from France (and waiting, and waiting…), I decided to give his advice a try. With help from Akkadboy, I built a list of basic signs, and I learned them in Anki at the rate of 3 to 10 per day. - Uniliterals. Each of these signs represents a single consonant or semi-consonant. These make up well over half the signs in most texts. I learned these at a rate of 3 per day, taking time to get the pronunciation right. - Bi- and triliterals. These signs represent 2 or 3 consonants. They're genuinely obnoxious to memorize, because they consist of nothing but bare consonants, many of which are hard pronounce. But fortunately, there's maybe 100 important ones, so if you just plow through, you'll be done in no time. I made heavy use of mnemonics, half of which were based on the sound, and the other half of which were based on breaking the characters down into single consonants, and making up weird stories involving the single-consonant signs. *** Lesson 1: When all else fails, mnemonics work. **** - Determinatives. These are the truly "ideographic" signs. They aren't pronounced, but they help distinguish between homonyms. For example, the words "scribe" and "write" have the same consonants, but their determininatives are a seated man and a roll of papyrus, respectively. Determinitives are much easier to learn than biliterals. 
Verdict: I'm not sure if was necessary to learn the characters first, but it has been amazingly helpful. In particular, I immediately recognize all but 2 or 3 characters per Assimil lesson, and critically, I can actually type hieroglyphics semi-efficiently. *** Lesson 2: If you're planning to learn sentences in Anki, learn the important characters first, and learn how to type them efficiently. *** Assimil's L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique. This is a genuinely fun course. I own both the book and the CD, and I recommend buying the CD if you can afford it. Hearing the words spoken makes it much easier to retain the vocabulary long enough for Anki to work its usual magic. The audio also helps bind the signs and the transliteration together in my head. The course spends the entire first week on the writing system. This is done by presenting and explaining 10–16 isolated vocabulary words per lesson. Weeks 2 through 4 describe the gardens and estate of an Egyptian nobleman, and start to discuss the lives of Egyptian scribes. These topics may sound "boring" or "irrelevant", but really, if you want practical vocabulary and modern slang, why would you be studying a 4,000-year-old language? Of course, what most people really want to do is read hieroglyphic inscriptions about kings and mummies, which Assimil (in its typical fashion) delays until well into the course. But things really start to come together at the beginning of week 5, and lessons 29 and 30 have a something for people who like conversations and cartouches. This is a conversation between the son of a royal scribe and an older scribe who knows his father:
In the course, the hieroglyphics are accompanied by a transliteration, a highly-literal translation preserving the Egyptian word order, and a loose French translation. As of lesson 30, I can actually read parts of these lessons by sight, and hear the words in my head. But remember, I've done a lot of extra Anki work in addition to the course. And even so, reading more than a few sentences is still physically and mentally exhausting. In the first 30 lessons of Assimil, there's a lot of grammar: at least 4 sentence types (which are important because Egyptian loves sentences without verbs, or where the verbs are doing strange things), several verb forms, two full series of pronouns, possessives and relative clauses. This is by no means a slow course, especially if you pay close attention to the grammar! I'd say that it covers less of the language than New French with Ease, but that it does so at an aggressive pace. Using Assimil with a French base. My French is currently around B2, and using an Assimil course written for French speakers is pretty much painless, to the point I barely notice it's in French. There's one important wrinkle, however: perhaps because Egyptian grammar is very different from Indo-European grammar, or perhaps because French is my L2, I can't "link up" the French and the Egyptian the same way I once "linked up" English and French. Instead, I need to internalize the Egyptian directly, and avoid translating it to French. This is sometimes hit or miss, especially when Assimil introduces too much new vocabulary in the space of 3 sentences. Overlearning Assimil using Anki. When I learned French using Assimil's New French with Ease, I spent about 20 minutes on each passive wave lesson, and the same (on average) for each active wave lesson. I didn't do all the fill-in-the-blank exercises. And when I hit the active wave, I struggled. But after ~180 days, I could actually carry on conversations in French and read the newspaper with a dictionary! So I've always believed that a quick-and-dirty pass through Assimil works fine. *** Lesson 3: You don't have to overlearn Assimil to succeed. *** But for Egyptian, I decided to go to the other extreme. Everything has been going into Anki, including the lessons, the translation exercises, the fill-in-the-blank exercises, and all the grammar tables from the review lessons. This means an extra 15 to 40 minutes of Anki review time each day (and some grueling data entry sessions), but it means that I learn almost everything within a few days of its first appearance. And that, in turn, means that I assimilate stuff faster and I activate it sooner. The total price: About 10 hours and 1,700 Anki reps, not counting the (larger) chunk of time I spent making the cards. *** Lesson 4: If you do overlearn Assimil, you'll master vocabulary and grammar much more quickly (and probably save yourself grief at the intermediate level). But you increase your risk of giving up completely. I encourage first-time learners to forget overlearning and finish the course. *** *** Lesson 5: If at all possible, get somebody else to type Assimil into Anki. *** 
Learning an ideographic, non-Indo-European language. Vocabulary definitely takes more work when your only cognates are the names of kings and gods! But grammar is delightfully fun:
If you (a) want to learn some delightfully exotic grammar, but you (b) don't particularly care to memorize huge tables of case endings, then you might want to consider Egyptian. And as far as writing systems go, Egyptian has been a delight. I can't deny that it looks cool. But there's a surprisingly reasonable number of signs to learn and they tend to be visually distinct. The whole system is extremely logical and at least 70% phonetic. Compared to Japanese, it's a very accessible writing system. Seriously, 8 hours and 1200 Anki reps is nothing to be able to say that you know the basic hieroglyphs. But when you add up the lack of cognate vocabulary, the non-IE grammar, and the ideographic writing system, it's definitely a harder language than French. I gotta go with the FSI here, and not Benny Lewis: Not all languages are equally challenging. What I can do after 30 days. Actually, I'm pleasantly amazed at how much progress I've made. Three weeks ago, the grammar examples in Lorprieno's amazing Ancient Egyptian: A Linguistic Introduction were a mess of incomprehensible consonants. Today, I can actually read and understand about 20% of them without looking up any vocabulary, and another 50% are clear after reading his notes. But for a more critical test of my abilities, here's a funeral inscription from Assimil lesson 30: 
Before looking at the lesson, I could read this as:
Sure, Assimil's been feeding me some key vocabulary for a couple of lessons now. But if I pick up a nice big picture book about Egypt and flip through a few pages, I can sometimes do almost as well. *** Lesson 6: 30 days of Assimil and 20 extra hours of Anki reviews will give you a surprisingly good base in a non-Indo-European language, even one with a moderately complicated writing system. *** After tomorrow, I plan to slow down, and let my recent Anki cards mature a bit. This will give me a chance to put my French back on center stage. But I hope to continue doing Assimil lessons at a more relaxed rate. Egyptian is an awesome language, and L'Égyptien hiéroglyphique is an excellent—but challenging—Assimil course. You should consider it the next time you're feeling the language wanderlust and want to try something really different. Edited by emk on 28 August 2012 at 7:09pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| 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 219 of 1317 28 August 2012 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks, @emk, for a well written and well documented review of your methods, Assimil and Ancient Egyptian. Looks like your "over-learning" of the lessons has paid off handsomely in such a short amount of time. I am very impressed with how far you've progressed in just a month's time. You may even have changed my mind on using Anki in future, especially if I ever go for a non-Indoeuropean language with a radically different script. Congratulations on another job well done on what looks to be a really fun side project.
It'd be off the scale cool to be able to go into a museum and read some of the hieroglyphs and get the gist. So, if you watch Stargate now, I wonder how much of Go'a'uld you can understand as a bonus? Edited by iguanamon on 28 August 2012 at 6:57pm 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 220 of 1317 28 August 2012 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you for your kind words! Anki is a very powerful and flexible tool for pounding stuff into aging brains. But you're limited to an average of 10–30 new cards per day if you want to stay sane, and it's vitally important to remember that Anki works for you, and not the other way round. And you've got to review existing cards daily, or you'll get buried. Anki cards should be as easy as humanly possible: short sentences, optionally with cloze deletions, are just about right. The exercises in Assimil make nearly ideal cards. But the Assimil lessons themselves sometimes make painful cards, because the sentences are too long to hold in my head all at once, and they involve too much new stuff at once. (Of course, the definition of "short" sentences varies tremendously according to context. In Egyptian, it's about 4 words. In French, a paragraph is no problem at all.)
Well, do you remember the scene where Daniel is correcting the translation on the blackboard in the military base? When he says the first word should be "year", I can glance at the hieroglyphs and confirm that he's perfectly correct, it's rnp.t. And when he gripes about Budge's translations still being in print, I know what books he's complaining about. So that's some nice language geekery right there. As for the actual Egyptian dialog in the movie, I don't stand a chance, because I've never learned the reconstructed vowels. Only specialists know the vowels, and they're still arguing over the details. Like Arabic and Hebrew, Egyptian is normally legible with just the consonants—and you get determinatives, which are way more awesome than vowel dots. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7203 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 221 of 1317 30 August 2012 at 6:45am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Your documented experiences with French and Egyptian are both interesting reads. You've got a very compelling and engaging writing style.
I was happy to read that you had some experience with Using French and the Assimil Business French courses. I take it that you used them as supplementary material to everything else you were doing in preparation for the DELF, not exactly following the Assimil method per se, but listening and reading and assimilating. Does the Business French course cover a lot of grammatical points or are they more cultural or related to usage? I'm just wondering if it's something you recommend adding to one's repertoire, or is it less engaging than New French With Ease? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5863 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 222 of 1317 30 August 2012 at 7:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Btw, do you have plans to release your Ancient Egyptian Anki deck?
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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 223 of 1317 04 September 2012 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thank you for your kind words! I used about a dozen lessons of Assimil Business French for listening comprehension while I was driving, and I really liked the course. Overall, I think it's a more advanced course than Assimil's Using French. Or at least it seems that way if you only do the first quarter of each course. There's some fun stuff in the business course, although like most Assimil humor, the jokes are pretty dry. There's a very stereotypical salesman in the first couple of lessons, a young business grad whose dad pulls wires for him, and even some union members who lock their boss in an office. The business course doesn't really spend any time on grammar. It focuses on listening comprehension (especially casual conversations between natives) and business vocabulary. There are also some very solid writing exercises which would be great for use on lang-8. This is also the only Assimil course that really prepares you for a DELF exam— specifically, the DELF B2 Pro, which is the the version of DELF B2 that focuses exclusively on business subjects. If you need to use your French in professional contexts, then Business French is an excellent course.
I have two decks: 1. Le Moyen Égyptien : Signes de base. This contains 204 hieroglyphs. This is currently available via PM to anybody who wants it, but I plan to upload it to AnkiWeb soon. 2. Le Moyen Égyptien : Assimil. This contains the first 30 lessons of the Assimil course. For now, this is only available via PM, and it's only available to people who've bought the Assimil course. Because I trust the HTLAL community, we'll use the honor system—just send me a PM saying you've bought the course or otherwise obtained a legal copy, and I'll send you a link. 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 224 of 1317 04 September 2012 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Here's my update for this week.
Egyptian. I'm still reviewing about 30 Anki cards per day, but they're "maturing" nicely. This means that I can answer them quicker, with a lot less mental effort, despite the growing intervals. For me, this is extremely typical—there comes a time when my knowledge of a card consolidates, usually around the 20-day mark. Sometimes I wonder if this isn't the rationale behind Assimil's passive and active waves, and the reason why 30-day-old lessons tend to be ridiculously easy. Simply put, once you've been able to kick something around for several weeks, it eventually transforms into a solid building block that you can use for other stuff. When I was preparing for the DELF, I had a lot of unconsolidated knowledge. This is probably one reason why immersion is so exhausting—you're stacking unconsolidated knowledge several layers deep, which is a recipe for fast progress at the cost of feeling overwhelmed. French. Back when I was working on French full time, I also mentioned that the day-to-day variation in my skills was about as large as the month-to-month improvement. This meant that a bad day one month was equivalent to a good day from the month before. Now that I'm learning at a much more relaxed pace, this variation is about as depressing as you'd expect. Last Saturday, for example, my wife and I had a long conversation in the car about all sorts of abstract stuff (books, life, the universe and everything). My vocabulary was bigger than when I took the DELF B2, but I was tired, and I stammered a lot trying to discuss the abstract subjects. Sunday, I could deal with day-to-day conversation without any trouble at all. Monday, my listening comprehension was dodgy. Even though I speak French at home, it's not easy to move from B2 to C1 in an English- speaking country with an English-speaking job. It's a constant fight to keep my various skills activated. My biggest allies are books and movies, so it feels really good to be getting back to the Super Challenge. And there's the usual parenting dilemma: The only way to watch an extra episode of Buffy is to sacrifice an hour of sleep. And lack of sleep hurts all my skills. But there is one upside: My "parenting" French is solid, fluent, and sometimes almost as natural as speaking English. It's merely everything else that suffers. So my plan is several two-fold: 1) Tighten up my time-management a bit, but not so much that I burn out. 2) Focus heavily on the Super Challenge. During this time, I'm also hoping to bump my business and consulting revenues up to the next level. So that's a big background task that you won't been seeing here, but it's another reason to get better at juggling multiple obsessions effectively. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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