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Slaughtering Languages with Largactyl! | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Largactyl Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4282 days ago 18 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Icelandic, Hungarian, Irish, Old English | Message 17 of 18 17 November 2013 at 3:06am | IP Logged |
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Hæ hæ,
Still truckin' along, although I've been focusing more on Irish than Icelandic the past week or so. My main update here is that I finally sat down with Calibre and was able to convert these HTML-format Icelandic sagas to .mobi format for my Kindle. PDFs are damn near impossible to convert to a readable .mobi, plain text doesn't have enough information to build a proper one, and for some reason the ePub files they have don't appear to have any chapter breaks. Once I settled on HTML I was able to concatenate all the sagas (I did separate ones for English and Icelandic versions) into one HTML file, and have Calibre convert it and auto-generate a table of contents. The only snag was that I wanted a 2-level table of contents, so the first one would have the names of the sagas, and when you selected one it would display the separate chapters, but apparently the .mobi format doesn't support that, so I settled for one with the names of the sagas. I had been planning to do this for a long time, so I'm glad I finally sat down and worked it out. School hasn't been going as well as I'd hoped, and my landlord is selling the house and I have to move out by the end of the month, so I'm a little preoccupied at the moment, but I still made it to both Stammtische that I go to and I at least listen to some Icelandic or Irish (or both) when I can. Progress is slow, but I'm not on any kind of time limit or anything so I'll just keep the course I'm on, and do as much as I have time for... 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Largactyl Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4282 days ago 18 posts - 20 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Icelandic, Hungarian, Irish, Old English | Message 18 of 18 24 November 2013 at 7:02am | IP Logged |
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So, a week later...
Spent a lot of time with both Irish and Icelandic, today was mostly Irish. I actually went back to Learning Irish after getting frustrated with Teach Yourself Complete's structure and pace. Basically the pace is far too quick for me and the structure seems very haphazard and bizarre. It's like "here's how to say such-and-such...oh, and such-and-such, and oh, that reminds of this other thing...". Yeah, of course I can just spend more time with each lesson, but I find it much easier to gauge my progress and stay on track when the pace is better built in to the material. Learning Irish has a much slower pace, at least grammatically, while introducing quite a large amount of vocabulary with each lesson. I know I won't remember every single word, but the grammar will stick better and won't be so intimidating as it seemed with Teach Yourself. I like the simpler, more consistent exercises as well, although I'm only on Lesson 4 and I've already found some mistakes in the answer key of varying magnitude. An example of the bigger one: Lesson 4, exercise 6 (Translation): 'There is good Irish here. There is no college at all.' First of all, what did I tell you about the bizarre prose style of these exercises? Anyway, I wrote 'Tá Gaeilge mhaith anseo. Níl coláiste ar bith ann.' The book has 'Tá Gaeilge mhaith anseo. Níl coláiste ar bith anseo ar chor ar bith.' Now, I'm willing to concede my word order at the end of the second sentence being off, but 1) anseo means 'here', which does not appear in the English sentence, and 2) (this is more speculation on my part) why do both 'ar bith' and 'ar chor ar bith' appear in the same sentence? It seems rather redundant and doesn't occur in any of the example Irish sentences so far; if it's correct then I'll try to take note of it (although I don't understand what necessitates that construction in this particular example), if it's not, then which one is the correct form of 'at all'? Also, I noticed the binding on my book is starting to fail around the first few lessons already; I haven't used it that much! But besides all that, it has grown on me. Especially the audio. The only English is at the beginning of the lesson when the guy (the author?) announces the number of the lesson. Then it's all Irish, mostly at native speed but with some pauses between clauses and with good sound quality, which is extremely important with Irish and all its extremely subtle (to my ears at least) differences between broad and slender consonants. With Icelandic, I sort of skimmed the rest of Teach Yourself Icelandic (I much prefer this Icelandic course to the Irish Complete course) and have started editing out the English on the audio and putting it on my mp3 player for the drive to work. I can see that the nouns are definitely going to take a long time to really get the hang of; verbs are relatively straightforward. Except, of course, those weird little impersonal verbs. I saw them pretty early on in Linguaphone, but of course Linguaphone didn't explain them and it was kind of annoying the crap out of me...Okkur þykir vænt um börnin okkar...where the hell is the subject of this sentence?! Glad Teach Yourself mentioned them; there certainly aren't many but some of them are often-used. Tonight I'm going to start on another saga (English translation) to maintain my motivation. Sorry for the long, rambling post. I've basically spent the whole day working on these languages and taking a break from my computer stuff as it's the first day of my Thanksgiving break so I had a lot to say. But it's my thread, ég geri það, sem ég vil! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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