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Dabbling in which languages in 2011? | ||
Tags: Dabbling | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| ilcommunication Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6514 days ago 115 posts - 162 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Russian, Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 9 of 26 02 November 2011 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I got into Turkish for a few weeks this year, but I had to cut it short when I got an opportunity for Spanish immersion. Other than that, I've been dabbling recently with French and Italian, and since I happened upon some resources and I made a few friends who speak it, I'm hoping to do the same with Quechua sometime before the end of the year. Of course, getting beyond dabbling with any of them is not far from my mind.
Yes, in my experience Russian is quite phonetic. It's important to get the stress of a word right, as well as the accent, and there are a few rare irregularities, but beyond that I think you'll find that it is pronounced phonetically. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6978 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 10 of 26 02 November 2011 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I dabbled when I spent a month working on Inari Saami. It was never in my plans but came about anyway when I made an impulse purchase of a kids' textbook this summer. My goal all along for Saamic had been to learn some Northern Saami since the resources for it are relatively abundant.
Apart from that I generally don't like to dabble since I'm ultimately dissuaded by the opportunity cost of forgoing efforts to study the languages which not only interest me strongly but are ones in which I figure I have a reasonable chance at attaining basic fluency (or in the case of Northern Saami high-intermediate competency) through independent study thus avoiding potentially expensive periods of immersion.
As to Russian pronunciation (and phonemic and phonetic spelling) my short answer is that compared to say English, Russian is read aloud rather phonetically. Compared to say Finnish, Russian is not. This post from a thread in Word Reference says it better than I could.
If you'd want to learn Cyrillic alphabet, why not try it from Macedonian or Belorussian? They're broadly similar to Russian Cyrillic (Belorussian Cyrillic in particular). The advantage of the former that I can see is that Macedonian spelling is a closer representation of pronunciation which has a rule that stress is fixed on the third-last syllable (or first syllable for words of two syllables). On the other hand Belorussian Cyrillic represents in a certain way Russian spelled more phonetically. Russian spells unstressed a and o as if they were stressed, but Belorussian spelling reflects this particular difference in stress. The following post from that same thread in Word Reference is by a native Russian.
I myself haven't studied either Belorussian or Russian seriously but based on my studies of Ukrainian, learning Cyrillic from Ukrainian may not be a bad option either. It has mobile stress like Russian but Ukrainian's lack of strong vowel reduction means that you don't get anything close to the inconsistency between spelling and pronunciation as you can see often in Russian. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| WentworthsGal Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4710 days ago 191 posts - 246 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Spanish | Message 11 of 26 02 November 2011 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Sadly (in some opinions) I've not dabbled that much this year and have only really been learning Swedish.
I did have the occasional idea to dabble in Irish, Polish and Egyptian Heiroglyphs but have managed to just stick to the one language - Swedish. I have found myself slipping French thoughts into my head after someone speaking French to me in the street... I might have to jump back into French sooner than I had planned to... I purchased some learning books from a charity shop - Slovak, Japanese and French but have yet to delve into them... I might try and stick to just Swedish until the new year... I'd rather get further in this one language before I start any more lol - but that's just me :o) I'm not a very good multi-tasker... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Fasulye Heptaglot Winner TAC 2012 Moderator Germany fasulyespolyglotblog Joined 5669 days ago 5460 posts - 6006 votes 1 sounds Speaks: German*, DutchC1, EnglishB2, French, Italian, Spanish, Esperanto Studies: Latin, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 26 02 November 2011 at 5:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I can understand travellers that they want to dabble in the language of the countries they want to visit, because it's useful, if you already have a bit of knowledge of the country's language. When I cross the border, I'm in the Netherlands and I speak Dutch fluently, so there is nothing for me to dabble. My trip to Danmark was a great exeption, so I decided in due time to make a real language study of Danish to prepare my stay there instead of mere dabbling. I don't see any chance for future travelling, so therefore there will be no necessity to dabble in some languages.
Fasulye Edited by Fasulye on 02 November 2011 at 5:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6731 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 26 02 November 2011 at 6:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If so, I've dabbled/flirted with Dutch (I've "read" a couple of children's books without any formal experience at all other than the slightly similar German vocabulary). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Michael K. Senior Member United States Joined 5551 days ago 568 posts - 886 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 14 of 26 02 November 2011 at 6:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I dabbled in Esperento too for about 2 months, but decided there are other natural languages (natlangs) that I want to learn first. I kept a log, and other forum members were great at dispelling my misconceptions about Esperanto, so I'm glad I did it.
I dabbled a little in French, but decided I wanted to try German first. I dabbled in Russian a very small amount, and don't know how to read Cyrillic, but it looks like a language I might try later. I also dabbled a little in Italian, and for a very, very short period of time I even thought about trying 4 languages at once, but it was a very bad idea for me. Italian looks great, and I'd like to try it in the future once I learn some other languages better. I already mentioned German, and I think I can study it regularly with Spanish, so for the moment I'm at the very least actively dabbling in German, but time has been at a premium for me lately, so I haven't studied languages this week yet. I don't know how successful I was at other things, but it was a very good year of dabbling. Dabbling is probably one of my favorite things to do, and I've even considered keeping a wanderlust/dabble log, but decided against it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| g-bod Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5804 days ago 1485 posts - 2002 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, German | Message 15 of 26 02 November 2011 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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When I first saw this post I thought "oh no, it's all been about Japanese this year for me" and then I slowly started to remember:
I flirted with Russian much earlier in the year. I got about two thirds of the way through learning the Russian alphabet and learned a few greetings before deciding I didn't have the time. The civil unrest in the UK over the summer temporarily reignited an interest in French as I was curious as to how the rest of the world viewed the situation. I still remember enough French from school to pick my way through a French newspaper so I spent a couple of weeks doing this. I even played with German at one point. I got three days into Assimil before I decided, as with Russian, that I really don't have enough time. And finally, I'm not sure if my relationship with Welsh counts as dabbling as I never really got as far as actually studying it, but I've been preoccupied by the thought of learning it throughout the year. I took some books out of the library but never really did anything with them. With all this dabbling going on, I sometimes wonder what was different about Japanese that I decided one day to learn it and have just kept going since then. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| iscem42 Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5072 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Mandarin, Hindi | Message 16 of 26 03 November 2011 at 12:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I tend to think that I'm dabbling, but it always seems to develop into something more long-term. Perhaps Dutch and
Catalan are exceptions, though even there it seems that I've developed a surprisingly functional reading knowledge, even if I don't plan on formally studying them in the near future. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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