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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6140 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes  | Message 9 of 13 29 April 2008 at 11:00am | IP Logged | ||
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I do not expect a reply, but I'm guessing the aforementioned two (or three) languages are Korean and Chinese (of two varieties)?
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 10 of 13 29 April 2008 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, here's a reply anyhow. Nope. The languages are Basque, Japanese, and (arguably) Polish. I was thinking of trying to ladder Japanese via Polish. It turns out that Polish<->Japanese and Basque<->anything have a serious shortfall of materials for L-R, though. Basque doesn't appear to even have a standardized term for audiobook; it has several ad-hoc ones which are used by at most a couple of writers, some of which also mean 'music CD' although they contain the Basque word for 'book'! There appear to be a negligible number of audiobooks in Basque, most of which are of poetry or short children's stories which have never been translated. As I've said, my concentration for the moment is on Polish. After that, I intend to get my Dutch up to a reasonable standard, so I can take full advantage of it when I visit the Netherlands in late August. After that, I want to do something non-Indo-European; I'm trying to decide what. Possibilities I'm semi-seriously considering are Japanese, Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, and Basque. There are a few other Asian and African languages I'm somewhat interested in, but I'm leaning against any of them as a 5th language to focus on. My tentative thoughts are to worry about it once my Polish and Dutch are solidified into at least basic fluency; at that point, I'll listen to each, make a serious survey of the materials available, and decide. As for Korean and Chinese: I have mixed feelings about both of them. I may decide to learn Mandarin one day, but it's not a high priority at this point in my life. I probably won't learn Korean (although I'll probably make a grammatical and phonetic study of it at some point): I think it would teach me a fairly limited amount beyond what Japanese would, in terms of both grammatical structure and culture. I really doubt I'll learn any Chinese language other than Mandarin, whether Cantonese, Wu, Classical Chinese, etc. If I had to choose a third Asian language, I'd tentatively pick Thai. If I become absolutely enamored with Asian culture and history, this paragraph may become entirely obsolete, but it represents my current views. A number of other languages are tempting for their literary traditions and/or usefulness for learning other languages due to having ample materials, but most of these are Indo-European. The most notable exception is Arabic, but I have no plans to resume it in the near future, or before Persian, which is Indo-European. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6140 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 11 of 13 29 April 2008 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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What about Tamil, Indonesian/Malay or Tibetan for other examples of non-Indo-European languages with an extensive literary history?
I think Indonesian would have some materials for study in Dutch as well? Considering colonial history. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 12 of 13 30 April 2008 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | ||
All three are interesting, and possibilities. With Tibetan, my impression is that the language has fragmented into rather different dialects, and the main one is fairly far from the classical language. For Tamil, I'm thinking of tackling at least one Indo-Iranian language before Dravidian ones. I didn't realize Indonesian/Malay had an extensive literary history. I'll seriously consider including them in my 'controlled wanderlust' phase. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 13 of 13 07 October 2008 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've taken an initial glance at Korean. Today, I received "A Historical, Literary, and Cultural approach to the Korean Language" by Alexander Argüelles and Jong-Rok Kim. I've spent the last hour reading it, with the caveat that I do not know Hangul and have not yet touched the audio tapes - so I skipped reading the dialogs in the original, in favor of English literal and literary translations. Aside from that, I skimmed the wordlists. Everything else, I read more or less in its entirety.
Overall impressions: - The book is extremely well laid out and done. - There wasn't much that was unfamiliar; I knew more than half the Hanja mentioned from my studies of Japanese, and the grammar was, while not identical, not all that foreign. Similarly, a lot of the Confucian ethos (ie, calling unrelated people 'uncle' and 'aunt', politeness levels, honorific and abasing language) were familiar to me from Japanese. - The content of the lessons is ok: not terrible, and not stellar. The impression I get is that they introduce grammatical points in a reasonable order. That said, I'm at a bit of a loss why one of the early translation exercises is the phrase "the monkey's buttocks are redder than mine", mirroring the first sentence of the first lesson: "Monkeys' buttocks are red". - The grammatical explanations are quite good. Several sentence patterns are illustrated in an extremely compact and useful table near the beginning of the book. Comparatives, volitional statements, etc are clearly summarized later on. - Different formality levels are introduced, along with some contractions, in an order and at a pace which seems quite reasonable and well-thought-out. - There were clear directions on how to use the book, learn the alphabet and sounds of Korean, etc. - There were quite a lot of cultural notes, and some historical and literary ones. In general, I'd say that it appears to be an excellent textbook. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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