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TAC 2009

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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6288 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 57 of 67
27 February 2009 at 10:24pm | IP Logged 
It looks like I'm not drifting as far as I thought.

Hungarian has heavy influences from German, including lots of 'mirror translations'/calques, and heavy Slavic and Germanic influences on the vocabulary; Wikipedia claims "The proportion of the word roots in Hungarian lexicon is as follows: Finno-Ugric 21%, Slavic 20%, German 11%, Turkic 9.5%, Latin and Greek 6%, Romance 2.5%, other of known origin 1%, others of uncertain origin 30%."

Still, it should be fun: when I can puzzle out words like töredezettségmentesítőtleníttethetetlenségtelenítőtl enkedhetnétek on my own, I'll really be getting somewhere with it - or when megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért seems familiar.



Edited by Volte on 28 February 2009 at 4:13pm

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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6288 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 58 of 67
08 March 2009 at 7:04am | IP Logged 
I seem to have 'accidentally' drifted into doing something relevant for my stated TAC goals: I read "Ombre sultane" this morning, in the original French (I've never seen it in any other language). It took 4 hours, almost to the minute; I read it in one session, without recourse to any external resources like dictionaries. It's just over 200 pages, and written by "Assia Djebar", a member of l’Académie française.

I'm picky enough that I'm not going to consider this passing the airplane test (occasional paragraphs were cloudy in meaning, for instance - and it would just seem weird to claim a pass in a language I'm as weak in as I am in French), but it's still a milestone I'm moderately happy about: it's the first complete novel I've read it French, if you exclude using "The Little Prince" in French as an L-R base for Spanish after internalizing the English contents, and exclude reading a couple of chapters of Camus, also as an L-R base language.

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Sprachprofi
Nonaglot
Senior Member
Germany
learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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2608 posts - 4866 votes 
Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian
Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese

 
 Message 60 of 67
08 March 2009 at 12:43pm | IP Logged 
Volte wrote:
I seem to have 'accidentally' drifted into doing something relevant for my stated TAC goals: I read "Ombre sultane" this morning, in the original French (I've never seen it in any other language). It took 4 hours, almost to the minute; I read it in one session, without recourse to any external resources like dictionaries. It's just over 200 pages, and written by "Assia Djebar", a member of l’Académie française.


Congratulations! Care to comment in the book club thread in the Multilingual Lounge?
1 person has voted this message useful



Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6288 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 61 of 67
08 March 2009 at 3:39pm | IP Logged 
aYa wrote:
Volte wrote:
I'm picky enough that I'm not going to consider this passing the airplane test

What's the airplane test? Do you fly high?


ProfArguelles wrote:

A meaningful standard of fluency for me is the ability to read an artistic work of literature such as a novel by a difficult author like William Faulkner or James Joyce. How many native English speakers can do this? How many do do this? I call it "the airplane test": take a 400-page novel of this type on an intercontinental flight and read it cover to cover by the time you land. If you remained engrossed and enthralled the entire time, you really know the language. You need to know about 20,000 words in order to do this, while you only need 10,000 for sophisticated conversation, and far fewer for daily needs such as business or study in a specialized field. In order to read a novel "fluently," you should not need to have recourse to a dictionary, but you should profit greatly from every single word you do look up if you choose to use one.


I'd forgotten the page requirement (and, frankly, I don't view 400 pages as a magic number - if you can read 200 pages, 400 or 800 at the same level are about equally easy, just more time-consuming). More importantly, "Ombre Sultane" isn't really that difficult of a book, in my opinion.

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Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6288 days ago

4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 62 of 67
08 March 2009 at 3:42pm | IP Logged 
Sprachprofi wrote:
Volte wrote:
I seem to have 'accidentally' drifted into doing something relevant for my stated TAC goals: I read "Ombre sultane" this morning, in the original French (I've never seen it in any other language). It took 4 hours, almost to the minute; I read it in one session, without recourse to any external resources like dictionaries. It's just over 200 pages, and written by "Assia Djebar", a member of l’Académie française.


Congratulations! Care to comment in the book club thread in the Multilingual Lounge?


I'm pondering what to say; it's not a novel I have anything particularly interesting to say about, honestly. "It was really descriptive/expository, with amazingly little dialog, and a lot of the scenes were quite disturbing" is a rather mediocre comment.

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ExtraLean
Triglot
Senior Member
France
languagelearners.myf
Joined 5843 days ago

897 posts - 880 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Spanish
Studies: German

 
 Message 63 of 67
08 March 2009 at 3:46pm | IP Logged 
Volte wrote:
"It was really descriptive/expository, with amazingly little dialog, and a lot of the scenes were quite disturbing" is a rather mediocre comment.


That's ok, I'm finding it a rather mediocre read.
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