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Chung at work / Chung pri práci | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5334 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 169 of 541 03 September 2012 at 3:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I meant to reply to this and add some Czech phrases to it. They also say "Drž(te) hubu!" plus a couple of others - Sklapni! = Shut up! Zavři zobák! = Shut up! (literally "Shut your beak!") I usually use zavři zobák because I like it. "Finally" is the same as in Slovak - "konečně" Edited by hribecek on 03 September 2012 at 3:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5334 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 170 of 541 03 September 2012 at 3:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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A few questions for you! I hope you don´t mind and obviously you don´t have to answer them.
How much time do you spend on your languages every day? How often do you speak or write to native speakers? Including on skype, email, telephone etc.? What do you do? I´m wondering because I know you travel to Europe a fair amount. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7141 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 171 of 541 03 September 2012 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It depends. It's probably around an hour and a half on a weekday when I don't have a class and if counting time reading / doing limited L-R in one of my target languages while commuting between work and home. On a weekend or long weekend, I'm more likely to spend closer to 2 hours per day on my target languages. Lastly on days when I've had lessons, I'd spend about two hours just on that target language as that's how long the lessons last. I'll be starting weekly lessons for Finnish and Ukrainian soon and this frequency is plenty for me since they're arranged after work, and I juggle these with other things on the go. I feel that I've overextended myself, but I'm not too worried since I expect to finish dabbling in Meadow Mari very soon and then start a new round of weekly classes for Finnish and Ukrainian which would be supplements to what I'm already doing independently. It's rather like the comment in scribe's question about classes where a decent class regularly imposes a set block of time to focus on the language.
Not that often anymore. I had a lot more exposure when I was a student and had a fairly extensive network of friends speaking my target languages at that time (i.e. lots of Czechs, Poles, Hungarians and Slovaks). However some of them have returned to Europe while others have moved away from my city and I've lost contact with them. It's a bit of a shame but that's life. These days the bulk of my exposure that I get to native speakers (apart from attending classes or watching streamed videos) comes from travel, the occasional visiting couchsurfer who speaks one of my target languages or sometimes Meetup (I'm lucky that I live close enough to places where I can attend monthly Hungarian, Polish or Czech meetups). I rarely communicate with other native speakers using Skype, email or phone partially because I don't have that much time (I used to do this much more when I was a student - especially e-mail since Skype hadn't taken off then) but also the difference in time zones between me and the Europeans makes it tough to establish regular contact for mere practicing.
I just work for the man and spend my hard-earned pennies on visiting friends in Europe. Nothing to see here. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| caam_imt Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 4847 days ago 232 posts - 357 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, Finnish Studies: German, Swedish | Message 172 of 541 03 September 2012 at 9:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Nice stuff Chung! it's cool to see another person who is interested in finno-ugric
languages. I you don't mind, I have to ask you something: In your experience, what is the language that shares the most features with Finnish among the finno-ugric languages that are not geographically close to Finland? with that I mean not Estonian/Veps/Karelian/Meänkieli/Saami etc. I am attracted to some finno-ugric languages in Russia (in a grammatical/written form), but I'm quite biased by the fact that I want to learn languages that sound different from each other. Since I want to learn Russian someday, I find that languages such as Karelian and Mari sound too much like Russian to my ear. I'm not quite sure in which language to dabble in, as I don't like how all seem to sound Russian-like (from what I have heard). Do you know if this is due to Russian influence on their phonetics or I have heard just speakers with Russian as a mother tongue? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7141 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 173 of 541 03 September 2012 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's hard for me to say since I haven't gone too deeply into those Finno-Ugric languages apart from Hungarian. The best that I can do is make a list of features in Finnish and then compare that list to what's in other Finno-Ugric languages. I'm guessing that one of Mari, a Mordvinic language or a Permic one would show the most similarity to Finnish if we consider your criteria for a related language in Russia that's not Finnic or Saamic. Khanty, Mansi, and the Samoyedic languages seem highly divergent compared to Finnish. If you want, I could do a little digging to come up with a little something later this week. I just can't do it right now.
I too perceive a certain Russian "twang" in those Finno-Ugric languages used in Russia and I do suspect that these speech communities having had so much contact with Russians, not to mention the elevation of Russian as the prestige language has exerted a certain influence on the characteristics of these Finno-Ugric languages. However I've never found anything explicit in my reference material that ascribes the current prosody of these languages to Russian influence. Based on what I've been to hear on the internet, the Samoyedic languages don't seem to sound "Russian" but they don't sound in a way that makes me recall anything Finno-Ugric either. When I hear these samples of Nenets and Nganasan (glossed transcript for the latter here), I get the impression of something vaguely like Mongolian, Korean or Japanese. Unfortunately for you these are beyond what you're considering they're only related to Finno-Ugric, and besides, none of these languages is blessed with much in learning materials for non-specialists. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5151 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 174 of 541 04 September 2012 at 4:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Chung, how do you manage for those languages not to overlap? If I'm not mistaken, you started them at
different times. I mean specifically the finno-ugric ones. I notice that you seem to study more from a linguistically/technicaloint of view. Is that a personal preference or us it related to resources constraints especially concerning the non-national ones? Btw, thanks for the help! Edited by Expugnator on 04 September 2012 at 4:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7141 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 175 of 541 04 September 2012 at 7:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
No problem. It's not too hard to confuse these languages since what I deal with isn't that closely related. I've never studied closely-related Finno-Ugric languages at the same time either. I started learning Finnish several months after having stopped studying Estonian, and the difference between Finnish and a Saamic language is such that it's tough for me to mix them up but I can still notice the similarity (the best analogy that I can conjure, imperfect as it is, is as if I were studying Latvian and Slovenian at the same time). Hungarian is the pioneer un my group having begun study of it many years ago, and its most closely-related language, Mansi, diverges quite a bit from Hungarian anyway. Yet it's all rather moot since I've never been able to study Mansi as the average joe. When I've studied these non-national Finno-Ugric languages, I've always intended to make these languages seem less mystifying to anyone reading the log. However this doesn't mean that I'll happily make do with trying to learn the language by using just descriptive manuals on grammar or a chrestomathy. I do prefer to learn how to use the language rather than only learn about the language's features. In all of the Finno-Ugric languages that I've studied, I've approached them with textbooks meant for non-specialists. I guess that I've just been lucky enough to find that course in Mari, as well as know just enough Finnish to take advantage of Davvin and some of the other goodies available for anyone wanting to learn Northern Saami. In a broader view I think that the non-national Uralic languages could stand to get a little more exposure even though the Saamic ones seem to me to be even better known to some randomly-chosen average language learner than the minority Uralic languages on both sides of the Urals and northwestern Siberia. Remember that most learning materials available for any Saamic language aren't published in English or one of the FIGS, and so I view my lengthy summaries of my progress through "Davvin" and "Sämikielâ 1" as potential aids for some earnest soul who would like to learn Northern Saami or Inari Saami respectively but would be otherwise shut out because of their not understanding the courses' intermediary language. I know that Kafea has taken advantage of my log since she's been trying to learn Northern Saami all as an English-speaking monoglot. It must be a real drag to learn a foreign language that's highly divergent from whatever one knows but with the added aggravation of the explanations in a language that is scarcely more intelligible (she was learning Northern Saami with Gulahalan but I'm not sure if she got too far with it since it was one thing to use the English translations of the dialogues courtesy Árran. It was another to try to make sense of the notes on grammar which were available only in Swedish and not translated to English at Árran). For Meadow Mari, I've put up lengthy summaries despite the course being comprehensive and in English with an eye to demonstrating that Mari isn't so exotic if one already knows at least one of Estonian, Finnish, Hungarian or a Saamic language. My philological interest is also at play when I put up these notes comparing features but I sometimes wish that I wouldn't because they do take a fair amount of time to compile and do the requisite verification with my reference material to back up or put my observations in perspective. Overall I've become a big supporter in the value of learning divergent languages or at least acquainting oneself with typology using several language phyla since I get a little tired of seeing people making linguistic generalizations drawing on what is a fairly restricted sample consisting of very closely-related languages (here I go again, bashing the people keen on the Romance and Germanic families - FIGS in particular :-P). I remember how plunging into Hungarian made me start to rethink how language can function and how humans can express an idea (see here, here, here, here and here for what I (or anyone in my position) could stand to gain by opening the mind even just a bit and dropping at least sometimes the filter imposed by regularly moving in small circles, linguistically speaking). Even though I've never studied a Turkic language, I've read enough about them to get a feel for what they're like and help myself determine whether these languages indeed could be part of the Ural-Altaic phylum as exciting as the idea sounded when I began my study of Uralic languages via Hungarian (BTW my conclusion after many years: the U-A hypothesis isn't likely and has unfortunately acted as a springboard for adherents of pan-Turkism, Turkish nationalism or Turanism, all of which I despise in keeping with my rejection of nationalism as conceived in the 19th century). You may notice that I generally keep my entries on progress for other languages quite short. I recall someone commenting a while ago that he appreciated my minimalist entries in my log for FSI Hungarian Basic Course. All that I put in every week or two was a sentence such as "Unit 2 down, 22 to go". A terse but grimly satisfying way of marking progress, I guess. For languages in which I'm pretty serious about attaining fluency, I usually cut to the chase reasoning that if anyone were that keen on getting a taste of what I've been covering, he/she can look it up on the internet or borrow a suitable reference manual from the public library. I'm not going to launch into analysis of Hungarian word order or case governance of Uralic adpositions in my log unless someone asks or I see some thread soliciting commentary on a topic in which I think that I can add my two cents. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| caam_imt Triglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 4847 days ago 232 posts - 357 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2, Finnish Studies: German, Swedish | Message 176 of 541 04 September 2012 at 8:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Hey thanks for your answer! It will be cool if you can find some info about the other
languages relationship with Finnish, but don't sweat on it, it's not that urgent :) Do you think that there's certain overlap with the Turkic languages of the area? I remember somebody suggesting that certain Finno-Ugric languages had some Turkic features but I can't really tell, since I haven't studied any. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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