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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6485 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 41 of 42 07 March 2012 at 4:22pm | IP Logged |
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Summary for February 2012
2 February 2012 (p.349) ENG: I have now read "Babel no more" by Michael Erard and decided to comment on it in a multilingual video. BrunUgle(ENG): Visited Iceland last summer, and they all more or less understood English and Norwegian, but replied to the latter in Danish - so apparently they still learn Danish up there. IC: I was there a few years ago. I didn't say much in Icelandic, but tried to think in the language and silently tried to translate the conversations I had into broken Icelandic ENG: The video about Erard's book is in the box noew, and the tour took me through 22 languages, many of which I can't even speak. 3 February 2012 (p.349) Jinx (ENG): Watched the video, was inpressed by the switching between languages and got interested in reading the book. ENG: The video will not be very informative for most listeners, but I have written a lot about Erard's book in the relevant thread at HTLAL. 4 February 2012 (p.349) Fasulye (ESP, DU): Has watched the video, but could sometimes not even keep track of which language I was speaking - it all became some kind of 'language soup.. 5 February 2012 (p.349) GER: My mother had to by a new digital satellite receiver because all German stations will stop sending in analog at the end of April. I have spent some times making a long list of all the programs she now has, which includes programs in Spanish, French, Polish, Portuguese, Italian and Catalan (plus Arabic, Chinese and Japanese). 6 February 2012 (p.350) Fasulye (GER): Her father has the same problem. GER: Something about the TV preferences of my family. ENG: Analysis of a sentence in Irish (Caithfidh an fear deifir a dhéanamh = verbrauchen-wird der Mann Eile zu machen = Der man muß sich beeilen), thoughts about how "caithfidh" ever got that role. Reference to the grammar at nualeargais.ie. From Lifandi Visindi: The Aymara see the future behind them, everybody else picture it ahead of them. 8 February 2012 (p.351) ENG: Read some texts from beo.ie (in Irish), and they were fairly difficult to understand. Reference to the quiz QI, where the question ""How many moons has the Earth got" was posed. Apparently there is some object called "Cruithne" out thee, but is has been much discussed at the homepage of the forum whether this really is a moon. 10 February 2012 (p.351) ESP: I followed Sprachprofi's link to the Esperantean version of "Le Monde diplomatique" in the thread "Esperanto - comprehensive list of links", and here I found among other things an article about the history of Myanmar, including the current period where the junta seems to be loosening it irongrip. FR: Some deliberations concerning "Birmo" (Burma) and the official name Myan-mar. 12 February 2012 (p.351) DU: I have read some papers in Frisian during a train tour to the town Holstebro. Also something about Danish dialects and a homepage with among other things short clips in in the dialect of Holstebro. RU: I visited Tenerife in December and brought back a little booklet in Russian about Canarian desserts and sweets, but have not had time to study it before now. Something about the word "кекс". 13 February 2012 (p.351) Serpent (RU): Something more about the word "кекс". Asks what "вкысыс" is. 14 February 2012 (p.352) RU: I wanted to write 'вкус' (taste), but in Lexilogos the 'y' key is interpreted as 'ы' - I have to press the 'u' key. The keyboard I used in Taipei had an icon which made it possible to write in English - the first of two signs for English looked like a telephone line with two birds over a rectangular sun on a horizon, and a road ran towards the sun. The man at the reception said it referred to American. If you didn't press this button it would compose (rather than write) Chinese signs. Serpent (RU): Mentions an alternative at the site translit.ru . Wishes me happy journey to China RU: Lexilogos normally suits me fairly well. And I'm actually going to Taiwan, not the People's Republic - but that's also China. DU: I passed through Schiphol and bought two Dutch magazines there. Fasulye: Misread something and thought I still was in the Netherlands. Knows "Wetenschap in Beeld" as the Dutch version of the Danish magazin "Illustreret Videnskab", but hasn't read "Kijk". Tarvos (ENG): Knows someone who has written things for "Kijk" and recommends it. Serpent (RU): Just remembered that the word for character in Russian refers to a person in for instance a film, while other words are used for the signs in books. Also noticed the word for 'time' in the Dutch and German words for a magazine (tijdschrift, Zeitschrift). 15 February 2012 (p.352) RU: to Serpent: there is actually a German newspaper called 'Die Zeit' DU: to Fasulye: I just passed through Schiphol Airport, I didn't stay in the Netherlands. Serpent (RU): Is 'Die Zeit" something like "The Times" or is it a 'tijdschrift' RU: to Serpent: "Die Zeit" is definitely a journal like "The Times" ENG: I have done my first full day of tourism in Taipei, Taiwan. And I have found out that 烏梅汁 (i.e. dark plum juice) tastes like smoked eel and tar. DU: According to "Wetenschap in Bild" mankind can be divided across racial and geographical divisions into three main group based on the dominant bacteria strain in their intestines. Also something about milk and Asians. 16 February 2012 (p.353) ENG: I visited the National Palace Museum, where I bought a guide in Spanish. Afterwards the Science Education Centre, followed by the Astronomy Museum. Most texts were in Chinese, but mostly I didn't need them because the pictures told me enough. I had a long talk with an employee and learned that the signed described above didn't mean "American", but "England" BrunUgle (ENG): Couldn't make my description of the sign two days earlier fit America, but it did indeed look like the first half of England. 17 February 2012 (p.353) DU: Have finished reading "Wetenschap in Beeld". It is part of a chain which also has a magazine in Denmark, so it was not totally unexpected to find several articles with relations to Denmark. For instance one about tome rocket amateurs who expect to send a man 200 km up in about 4 years time. Another dealt with the personnel at the fortresses built by king Harald Bluetooth 1000 years ago. Fasulye (GE): has read about hybrid between bears and polar bears at the zoo in Osnabrück in "Bild der Wissenschaft". 18 February 2012 (p.353) GER: I'm against crossbreeding for fun in zoos. ENG: I have moved to Hualien at the East Coast og Taiwan. I have also a Chinese keyboard here. At first it tried to identify everything I wrote either as an English word or as the beginning of a Chinese sign, but then I found a button which made it write in Enlgish (one page at a time). Fasulye (GER): If zoos shouldn't produce hybrid they would have to kill their newborn bear cub. But apparently nobody knew that its parents had bred succesfully. Now the 'mixed' keeping of bears has stopped. 19 February 2012 (p.354) GER: Brown bears and polar bears are almost genetically identical, so it shouldn't have been such a big surprise. ENG: I have been thinking about how Westeners learn Chinese. It seems to me that the center of Chinese learning should be texts, dictionaries and grammars with the Chinese signs, but first and foremost some kind of pinyin with tone markings. BA I: I have been studying a French and a Bahasa Indonesian version of the brochure about the metro in Taipei. Fasulye: The hybrid bears have certainly been castrated or sterilized. 20 February 2012 (p.354) ENG: Now in Tainan, where the computers at my hotel have three operation systems (presumably in Chinese, Japanese and English). I am wondering how people can identify Chinese signs which are so small that you hardly cansee the individual lines. I assumed that the main problem with tones was that Pinyin didn't mark them but... I also reread some of the receipts in my Russian bakery book from Tenerife. BrunUgle: Pinyin does have tone markings. And people live with the small signs by recognizing the general shape of a sign rather than individual strokes. 21 February 2012 (p.354) ENG: I assumed that Pinyin didn't have tone marks because they aren't written in for instance street names etc. - but the recognizable words here are meant to be in English. If I ever learn a tonal language it is unlikely to be Chinese (because of the signs), but Vietnamese was a possibility (not likely to happen, though). And I'm not going to the Esperanto Universal congess in Hanoi later this year, whereas I'm thinking about attending one in Galway - also to collect stuff and listen to Irish. 22 February 2012 (p.354) DU: Something about the Dutch magazine "Kijk" Fasulye: Not really her taste in magazines. Alexander86 (ENG): If I go to Galway I'll definitely hear some Gaelic Irish. 23 February 2012 (p.355) ENG: Last day in Taiwan, and it is raining. TV there is not good - just a few exceptions, mostly from Hakka TV (or local versions of Animal Planet and Nat.Geo). Platt: Read my Kauderwelsch Plattdeutsch in the train back to Taipei the day before. Needed a dictionary to write in my log and found one on the internet - fairly small, but with examples. GER: Not too impressed by this book because it is unsystematic and mostly a collection of funny expression about farmers 25 February 2012 (p.355) GER (morning): Now in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, where the keyboard isn't QWERTY, but QWERTZ. ENG: During the flight back from Taiwan I had filled out the sudokus in my booklet, and then I began copying Chinese characters in the empty space in it from Kauderwelsch "Hochchinesisch" (i.e. Mandarin) GE: The first thing I did after the flight was to visit Speyer, where there is a fine cathedral from the time of the Salian dynasty (around 1200), but also a Sealife Aquarium. Also a stop in Worms to see the cathedral there. RU: Something about one of the receipes in my little book from Tenerife, where the surprise is the immense number of eggs you need for a certain cake ('biscuit' from Moya with icing+ something like merengues made from the rest of the icing). GER (evening): Have seen 6 museums. In one of them, the Arts and Crafts museumthere was an exhibition about China, which included a Chinese signs -> Pinyin dictionary sold in 400.000.000 copies or so. Bought 4 German magazines, one French and one in Russian at the Central station. In the Russian one there is - according to the title page - an article about the dangers you face by eating in Chinese restaurants. 27 February 2012 (p.355) Fasulye: Has a Dutch keyboard with QWERTY, but meets the QWERTZ keyboards everywhere else in Germany. ENG: The danger lurking at Chinese restaurants is ... Monosodium_glutamate. FR: In "Science et vie" there was among other things a theme about the possibility that a number of diseases, including mental diseases, are either caused or provoked by bacterial or viral infections. Fasulye (GR): How come that I didn't have problems with the airport strike in Frankfurt? 28 February 2012 (p.355) GER: I arrived Friday morning and things functioned normally then (but strikes both before and after). I came back home to Denmark by train as planned (on a special offer on 1. class). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6485 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 42 of 42 30 March 2012 at 5:40pm | IP Logged |
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Summary for March 2012
2 March 2012 (p.356) BA I: I'll do something about Bahasa Indonesian, which wasn't represented between the materials I brought with me to Taiwan. I have however read my two Dutch magazines and some stuff in Icelandic over there. Brun_Ugle (ENG): Is fascinated by the French article I mentioned the 27/2, and which suggests that bacterial/viral infections can cause a number of diseases, including several which consist in malfunctions in the brain (eg. Alzheimer and Lyme's disease). ENG: Aspergers wasn't mentioned in that article, but autism in general was. Lyme's disease is caused by bacteria belonging to the genus Borrelia, and the way you get this infection is by being bitten by ticks. FR: reference to an article on the internet about volcanism on the Moon (for Fasulye) ENG: I have read two German science magazines, and in one of them there was an article about the way our body posture can influence our behaviour. This reminded me of a TV program with the mind control expert Darren Brown who explores the ways you can control people through clues in their surroundings. The AJATT method can be seen as a way to use the surroundings constructively in language learning. Brun_Ugle: She once saw a show where they made the participants hold a pen in their mouth and mark how funny they thought a joke was. The ones that had to hold the pen in their lips so that their lips were pursed didn't think the jokes were very funny. The ones that were made to hold the pen in their teeth so that their lips were back in a smile position thought they were much funnier. Fasulye: Has read and translated the article about volcanism on the Moon to Dutch. 4 March 2012 (p.356) ENG: I have visited my mother and her Astra satellite receiver this weekend. On the way down I could finish my two German magazines, but I had luckily also brought my Kauderwelsch Irish, so when she asked whether I was writing Chinese I could in all earnest answer "Nej, det er irsk gælisk". We also watched German TV, including programs from German Zoos. Fasulye (GER): Has the impression that zoo programs are becoming more rare. 5 March 2012 (p.357) GER: Saturday we watched TV from Hellabrun in München (Munich), followed by Wilhelma in Stuttgart. Sunday programs from Berlin and Bremerhaven - and all these programs are called an animal, another animal and co. POR: Sunday I had my mother TV & Astra for myself one hour and used the opportunity to have a look at TV Galacia .. (reference to a Wikipedia page with diferences between Gallego and Portuguese) CAT; ... followed by TV3 from Catalunya, but they were showing something religiuos, so I continued to.. FR: TV5 from France, where I saw a comparison between the lavish court of Sarkozy and the much cheaper and simplerstyle surrounding Merkel. GER: Had noticed the X i "Xoves" in Galician (thursday), which reminded me of the Spanish town Játiva (Jàtiva in Catalan, an formerly Zàtiva), which was the first place in Europe whee paper was produced. From there a German merchant clandestinely brought the invention to Nürnberg in Germany. 6 March 2012 (p.357) ESP: I have tested the newest optoionin Google Translate: Esperanto. There were the usual errors, but it is not too bad. The strangest thing is that it apparently uses Spanish as intermediary language instead of English. Btw. I have signed up for an Esperanto congress i Ireland later this year. Fasulye: Will participate in an Esperanto meeting in the Netherlands for blind people (although she can see). GR: Now I have also seen a Zoo program from Lüneborg called "Wolf, Bär & Co.". Nest thing will probably be a program from an aquarium called "Tilapia, cod & co"). 7 March 2012 (p.357) Fasulye (GER): Are zoo programs restricted to Germany? She hasn't seen them in Dutch and French TV. GER: Fasulye and I have been discussing television programs from zoos, and Germany they are always called "Someanimal and Someotheranimal and Co.". This holds true even though Fasulye has noticed a decline in this genre. In Denmark there has only been one program on DR long ago, and it has been shown again again. The local channels have sometimes programs, but they are regional and it is difficult to find out what they intend to send. 9 March 2012 (p.357) LAT: Something about a channel at Yourtube where a Latin-enthousiast named Evans1965 has published an enormous number of videos in order to teach people Latin. SP: My bus-back-from-my-job reading is currently a guide to the National Museum at Taipei in Spanish. 10 March 2012 (p.357) BA I, RU, ESP, IR: I have made wordlists in a number of languages IR: 10 % of the population in Galway have allegedly Irish Gaelic as their primary language. Irish is difficult to learn! 12 March 2012 (p.358) SP: The day before I watched a long program about prehominids on TVE, where scientific programs normally are very rare. This one even seemed to have been made in Spain instead of bought from IK or USA and dubbed - there were several references to excavation sites in Spain. LAT: I have read the guidelines for moderators of the Latin Wikipedia, where the author(s) among other things listed all the things that should be removed at sight - including machin translated texts and texts with gross errors in the syntax. 16 March 2012 (p.358) RU: I have returned to my old Russian history book, where I studied the beginning of the chapter about Ivan the Terrible. BA I: After that I returned to my guidebook from Singapore, where I read about several museums including the Peranakan Museum (which tells about the Chinese and Indian SP: I watched a program at TVE about Spaniards living in Tanzania - and who generally seemed to like the culture there. IT: Ryanair has made a new route from Jutland to Sicilia, so I'll go there later this year. 19 March 2012 (p.358) ENG: I have visited my family in Southern Jutland once again, and in the train there and thence I read parts of an old book with French expressions and parts of my Kauderwelsch Irish. During my tay I also managed to cull some expressions from a TY Indonesian. Saturday I watched a program at TV Galacia. Mostly I haven't got problems with Galacian because I know Spanish and Portuguese, but this time they featured two elderly persons from the country side, and they were not easy to follow. This reminded me of a man at my hotel in Palma de Mallorda who spoke Mallorquí, a dialect of Catalan, and it also took some time to adjust to the way he talked (but then we just slided into Castellano). I brought a small Russian dictionary, which was lucky because there was a Russian word in her crossword this time. ENG: I have made a bilingual version of the staff list of a Gaelic school in Ireland, using Google translate, and it made some rather strange errors. Tarvos (ENG): Asks whether I decide the language in which I'll write each part of this log randomly. ENG: I usually let my study objects decide which language I use (i.e. German zoo --> German), and because I also try to study my languages in rotation there will also be a rotation of languages in my log. Today I made some printouts in Irish and wrote about it. Irish is right now a high priority language for me because I'll visit Galway in Ireland later this year. Russian and Bahasa will typically be represented here after I have done text copies and intensive text studies. In contrast my German, French, Spanish etc. messages will often be based on TV programs or things I read in the sci mags. 22 March 2012 (p.358) ENG: I have mostly done wordlists the last couple of days, and there is not much to write about that kind of activity. AF: I have made some bilingual texts in Afrikaans and Danish, include something about the Nasional Museum in Bloemfontein, South Africa. I have also found a list with 97 SouthAfrican newspapers, but most are in English and there are some broken links. The homepages of newspaper often contain a few videos, enough to keep me occupied. 23 March 2012 (p.359) IR I have studied three portraits of teachers from the Gaelic School of Docherty. GR: I haven't listened to Greek for some time, but I could read a whole page about monuments in Athens without looking words up. ES: I have studied some letters from a professor Culbert, som once upon a time made some assessments of the number of people who can speak Esperanto - 1.5 - 2 mio. he said. A professor Lindstedt from Finland has made his own assessments, and for him maybe 1 mio. can read it, but max. 100.000 can use it actively. SW: Swedish TV has shown a program about dialects, where the big question was how the soalled 'long i' had travelled from a poor fishing community at the Swedish Westcoast to a posh part of the capital Stockholm. The conclusion: visiting children had brought it back with them to Stockholm. ES: When I should have slept I thought through in details how I in a hypothetical situation would expain my wordlist layout in Esperanto. The theme of the congress in Galway will be "cheap ways to learn languages". Tarvos (RU): How long time do I study daily? And what about Dutch? RU: I amd not married and I don't spend my evenings on pubs so there I have a fair amount of free time for studying. But I ought to spend more time on listening and speaking. Mark (RU): Corrections to Tarvos' mesage. Serpent (RU): I forgot to write about me and Dutch. DU: True, I forgot that. I have travelled quite alot in the Benelux countries and I could base my Dutch studies on German, so written Dutch came gradually to me - but I went quite suddenly from not understand anything to being able to watch internet podcast in Dutch. I have written about this in an old thread about the phenomenon "epiphany". 24 March 2012 (p.359) ENG: Saturday and a good day for studying. First some Indonesian wordlist. RO: I have taken up an old project, namely marking verbs with and without an infix in my Teora dictionary. I take the information about this from an old monolingual Romanian dictionary from the Academy. Did F to H. LAT: Watched a program at the Science channel about the archeosaur Poposaurus and how it moved. Afterwards I read in Saxo's Gesta Danorum about the end of the reign of king Hadding and the beginning of that of Frodo his son. 25 March 2012 (p.360) ENG: Looked through a number of videos from a site called 'Languagehunters', which teaches people Irish through a combination of an extreme version of the natural method and a homebrewed sing language. Afterwards I used the speech synthethizer abair.ie on a number of sentences from the staff list of the Gaelic school. 27 March 2012 (p.360) FR: For the time being I read a Livre de Poche about French expressions in the bus back home from my job. I have checked a few selected expressions to see how often they actually are in current use. IR: I sometimes before used the speech synthesizer abair.ie to listen to sentences in Irish. Now it has at long last occurred to me that it is a waste of time unless I write down what I hear. This forces me to listen to everything and not just to selected sounds like I have done before. For the experiment I used the text with the staff of that Gaelic school. MARK: How do I mark slenderness in my Irish transcriptions? Points out that soft D is pronounced exactly as soft G. ENG: I had originally planned to use the signs for soft d and g in Greek for my transcriptions from Irish, but there is no soft d in Irish. This error will be connected, and then I'm ready for more intensive listening according to the program above. I have discovered that simply writing down the sounds actually is so captivating because I then can relearn them properly later. I have also found out how much a normal person actually catch on the fly - and it is not very much! IC: I wanted to use the same method som I did for Irish on other languages, but abair.ie has only one voice, so instead I turned to another speech synthesizer A Capela, which has several voices to choose from in most languages. And then I fed it some sentences about Burgers' Zoo in Dutch. 28 March 2012 (p.361) IC: Same exercise in Icelandic, except that I don't know any decent speech synthesizer for Icelandic (the one at Google translate sounds like an evil scrambling robot from the 50s). Instead I used a clip from Youtube where the beginning of the talk was transcribed in the accompanying message - although with some differences. 29 March 2012 (p.361) ENG: my newspaper was missing this morning so instead I read most of a 19-page print of an Irish mini-grammar (called 'guide') in the bus. Later I checked some grammars on the internet: "Gramadach na Gaeilge" by a certain Braesicke and the grammar of the brothers Christian, which in its paperform has been a staple reference for Irish grammar for a long time - but it is written in Gaelic so I stick with hr. Braesicke. 30 March 2012 (p.361) RU: I have read in an Indonesian language guide on the way home from my job, and later on I have watched a quiz in the French channel TV5. Besides I have made a long wordlist based on excerpts from my Russian history book which I some time ago have copied/studied intensively. I took it up again recently and got to the point in the book where Ivan the Terrible kills in own son in a rage. RU: I have been looking at a site with the 500 most common nouns in Russian, and I more o les knew them. The important thing is however that there is a page with examples and constructions for most of these nouns, and that these pages use both literal and 'free' translations. POR: I have returned to the Acapela Box and fed it lines from a fado-text. There were one voice from Brazil and another from Portugal (plus one from the world of fado) so I got the chance to compare the dialects. Edited by Iversen on 30 March 2012 at 5:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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