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Geoffw in TAC2015: RU, HE and Friends | ||
Tags: Football/Soccer | Yiddish | Hebrew | Dutch | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Russian | German | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 177 of 251 23 January 2014 at 9:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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So...I just taught myself the Georgian alphabet. No, I don't plan to take up Georgian,
and no, I don't really know why. I guess I just was finding it frustrating to see an alphabet that I can't even sound out. I guess now this means I'll have to learn the Armenian alphabet, too. Not sure if Hangul is sufficiently difficult to avoid. But if I learn those (and maybe take a refresher on Arabic), I think I could say I've learned the basics every non character (i.e. Chinese/Japanese) writing system commonly used outside of South Asia. (At which point, someone jumps in and corrects me.) But now I can pronounce the squiggles on those bottles of Georgian wine at the Russian grocery. Better still, there often will not be anyone around who can correct my pronunciation. In other news, yes, I'm still working on my Russian and making slow and steady progress. Finished 216 pages of HP5, and I'm understanding slightly (but noticeably) more words in each chapter than the one before, despite basically abandoning my parallel reading effort in French. EDIT: I knew I'd forget one. Ge'ez (Amharic). Never studied it, not a South Asian script. Edited by geoffw on 23 January 2014 at 9:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4954 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 178 of 251 23 January 2014 at 9:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Good to hear! I really like the alphabet and it's one of the factors that drew me into
the language. If you ever feel like studying the language, drop me a line. I find the Armenian one harder. The letters look more similar and the spelling is not 100% phonemic. Another reason I chose Georgian instead of Armenian (first one being that Armenian was just a distant IE language). Georgian themselves claim to have invented wine (which is a good point I can make if I want to visit Georgia in the future). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 179 of 251 23 January 2014 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Aha! So it's your fault! I must have followed you because you're studying Russian, and
then I saw that you've been writing Georgian in your log. ;-) Thanks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 180 of 251 23 January 2014 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wonder how many more people on HTLAL would be studying Basque if they had a unique
alphabet... 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 181 of 251 24 January 2014 at 6:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I recently saw this video recommended in
a thread on here about learning Russian cases. The video itself is about learning Czech, but the idea is easily transferable. I also just took a look at this page, which includes a few charts of declensions for Russian, and decided to use that technique to try memorizing some subset of them, with the idea that a few round of this, and I will have memorized all of the declension charts. I am happy to report that I memorized the first pattern, using the method described in this video, in less than a minute. That is, the 12 endings for a 1st declension noun with -a in the nominative singular. I continued and managed to learn the entire 1st declension chart (i.e., 3x12 = 36 total endings) in around 5-10 minutes, including a few repetitions of writing down the different endings from memory. I did not yet try to learn the different exceptions in the chart--I'm lazy and I didn't feel like it right now. It'll still be there whenever I come back to it. I won't share my mnemonics here because 1) if you want to use this technique, I think it will work best to use something you come up with yourself, and 2) I find that mnemonics work best if I make them as scandalous and socially-inappropriate as possible, thus making them more memorable. The obvious weakness here is that knowing how to recreate a table from memory is very different from using the endings in real life, but you have to walk before you can run, right? As for the claim in the video of 57 different declension patterns, I'm sure that's technically correct, but I wonder what that number really represents. For example, when there's a footnote in the table that says "After a sibilant or a velar (г, к, or х) consonant, и is written," does that mean that this defines one more declension pattern, or is this an exception/lexical rule that modifies a single declension pattern? I bet it's more of the latter. Either way, by my count there are something like 12 total basic declension patterns presented in these charts, and a number of minor tweaks and exceptions to apply to them. So that's 3 down and 9 to go... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| renaissancemedi Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Greece Joined 4146 days ago 941 posts - 1309 votes Speaks: Greek*, Ancient Greek*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Russian, Turkish, Modern Hebrew | Message 182 of 251 24 January 2014 at 6:16pm | IP Logged | ||
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Using mnemonics is great before we learn to say things automatically.
Do share some tricks! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4476 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 183 of 251 24 January 2014 at 6:23pm | IP Logged | ||
Well, the technique in the video I shared was one, and the other that I use (for learning vocabulary) is this one, that I got from the Farber book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4632 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 184 of 251 24 January 2014 at 6:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know how sensible it is to learn the Russian declension paradigms from charts. The point is that the declension of a Russian noun depends a lot on phonological features of the noun stem, so I think it would be wiser to learn basic patterns first and then elaborate on the variations of this pattern.
For example, feminine nouns ending in -я don't really decline differently from those ending in -а. The difference is that their stem ends in a soft consonant, so the endings have to reflect the softness of this consonant. The same is true for the basic masculine and neuter patterns of the second declension. So, once you know how a noun with a "hard" stem is declined you automatically know how to decline nouns with a "soft" stem by exchanging the hard vowels for the corresponding soft vowels. Once you have understood this system, declining is much easier! There are some extra rules for nouns ending in -ий, -ия, and -ие and then there are some partly orthographical, partly grammatical rules that have to be observed (like writing и after г, к, х and sibilants). Also, the third declension is completely different from the others and the genitive plural doesn't really conform to declension classes, but (once again) to phonological features. And, last but not least, there are some irregularities, because if there weren't any irregularities it wouldn't be Russian! ;) But all this becomes much easier, if you learn the basic patterns first! So, in my opinion, learning the basic patterns first and then learning the exceptions is much easier than learning all the patterns at the same time. I, for one, learned the declensions by cases. This is the easiest way and gets super-easy in the plural (if we ignore the genitive). But it's of course up to you what learning style suits you best. Edited by Josquin on 24 January 2014 at 6:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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