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Using phrasebooks to analyse grammar | ||
Tags: Phrasebook | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6914 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes  Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 2 23 March 2009 at 12:26am | IP Logged |
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Does anyone have any experience with using phrasebooks to figure out a language they've never studied? I've just recently bought two phrasebooks, one for Asia with 10 languages and one for India with 15 languages, and have been looking through the entries for languages I've never studied.
It's fairly easy to compare the English and the foreign language phrases and figure out words like 'you', 'I', etc and even a little bit of the grammar (for example, verb endings changing according to the subjects). Here's a few phrases I looked at in Indonesian. Where are you from? - Anda dari mana? I'm from England - Saya dari Inggris Where do you live? - Anda tinggal di mana? I love it here - Saya senang di sini From these few phrases I can already guess that 'you' is 'anda' and 'I' is 'saya'. 'Mana' turns up twice in the 'where' sentences but the 3rd sentence has 'di' tacked onto the beginning. Possibly it means 'at where' or something. Because 'di sini' is similar to 'di mana' that probably means 'di sini' is 'here' or 'at here'. So does anyone else do anything similar? Could this have any instructional use at all? One thing I noticed is that while it was fairly easy to work out Indonesian (a language reputed for being easy to learn), it was much harder trying to do the same with Khmer! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 2 23 March 2009 at 12:54am | IP Logged |
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I have written some comments about my use of a Cebuan phrase book in my multiconfused log from the 26/01-09. The reason that I found this book exceptionally useful for this kind of analyses is that it excelled in repetitions of partly identical phrases, which is essential if you want to identify different parts of sentences in a totally unknown language. Normal phrase books have a tendency to provide as varied texts as possible instead of simple repetitive phrases, so they aren't really suitable for this kind of analysis. But of course you can learn something from their grammatical sections, and if they have literal or even hyperliteral translations then you can to some extent also see through the variations.
Let me add that I continued from Cebuan to Tagalog, where I had somewhat more material including some dictionaries with grammatical sections, and I found that some of my basic conclusions from Cebuan could also be applied to Tagalog. If I had time I would certainly spend more time with these languages. Of course the linguist who has to write the first grammar of a language has to learn it and analyse it from examples elicited from native speakers, and there has been written thousands of pages about the techniques for doing this, not least by the American linguists of the Bloomfield school. See for instance old issues of the journal "Language". Edited by Iversen on 23 March 2009 at 11:14am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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