Language Geek

Over the past few days, I’ve been focusing some more on Dutch. I’m up to lesson 31 of Dutch with Ease. I realize I’ve said it many times before, but: I love how Dutch vocabulary corresponds so clearly to English and German vocabulary. We in Dutch; we in English. Eenvoudig in Dutch; einfach in German. I’m getting better at understanding the spoken language (at least the Assimil version of the spoken language…), but reading is still much, much easier.

I’ve also done a tiny bit of Russian recently, working a bit on lesson 54 of Russian without Toil, as well as on some of the exercises in chapter 12 of the New Penguin Russian Course. Nothing overly exciting about either, however. I want to sit down for a few hours and plow through a bit of my Russian history book soon.

And, finally, I’ve been trying to decide on how I want to rearrange my language learning schedule. While I’m making progress, certainly, I’m not entirely happy with my haphazard way of hopping from one language to another. Some languages tend to get lost in the mess, and as of late, French has been suffering quite a lot – not to mention poor Spanish, which seems to have wholly vanished from my studies. I’m not frustrated enough to slash any more from my current list, but I’m going to have to put my current list into some sort of overall structure to please myself. I’m just not entirely sure how I’m going to do that. I know some people insist on sticking to one or two languages until they’re mastered them (whatever that means), but I don’t see myself doing that. I’ve also read of some people spending a few months on a couple of languages, then switching to other languages for a few months, etc. Again, I’m not sure I could do this.

Hrm. I’ll figure something out.

Today was largely a Dutch day. In Dutch with Ease, I reviewed lesson 24, then went ahead and did the passive wave for lessons 25 and 26. I’ve decided that, seeing as I’ve not exactly had much trouble with Dutch, I’m going to try and push through the passive wave of Assimil fairly quickly, rather than going slowly and meticulously. Once I’ve gotten through the first pass I’ll go through it again most likely, in a slower manner.

Later in the evening, I took my copy of Russisch ohne Mühe to bed with me, and reviewed lesson 24. I’m not sure why, but my bookmark was on that lesson, so it seemed as good a lesson as any to review.

I’ve been a bad student as of late, having not done a whole lot of language learning and having not posted much about it here.

For German, I’ve been adding vocabulary to Anki; nothing new there. I did another copying session with French with Ease, and today, I did two Assimil lessons, one for Dutch and one for Russian.

For Dutch, it was lesson 24; for Russian, it was lesson 54 of the 1951 Russian without Toil. Not a whole lot to note about either, I’m afraid, except for one thing: in the Russian lesson, the English translation refers to telephonic robots. I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. All I can think of is something like today’s autodialers which call people for advertising purposes. At any rate, telephonic robots sounds hilarious.

Russian

As a review (and for something to do while doing less interesting things, like dishes and laundry), I listened to lessons 8-28 of Russisch ohne Mühe. After listening to it, I’m reminded again of the fact that while I progress more slowly due to the base language being German, I still prefer Russisch ohne Mühe (1971) over Russian without Toil (1951). It seems tighter, and just generally to be of better quality. I suppose that’s logical enough, what with it being the second “try” at a Russian course for Assimil.

Dutch

While I didn’t do a whole lot of it, I finally got around to copying out some Dutch by hand for some much needed spelling practice. I copied lessons one and two of Dutch with Ease. I’ve already noted a few things I had not noticed previously, despite reading the lessons repeatedly. For example, it’s maakt, not makt (makes, does), and zes, not ses (six). I also listened to around 15 minutes of Dutch radio online, but didn’t really understand a great deal of it. I know that at one point they were talking about Michael Jackson, however…

German

I added around 40 cards to Anki, mostly from Langenscheidt’s Basic German Vocabulary text. Still plugging vocabulary holes, it seems. A few of them were from a paragraph from the Wikipedia article Chinesisch-Schwedische Expedition; I’m not quite sure what in this article caught my eye, but I found the paragraph stuffed in a Google Documents file with a number of translations already added in at the bottom. The one that I found most interesting was the phrase “vor Ort,” which means “on site, in the field.”

I also listened to an episode of ZeitZeichen. It was about the death of the Aztec leader Moctezuma II (later to be called Montezuma by the Spaniards).

Danish

Did I say Danish? Um, yes, yes I did. You see, I was looking on Abebooks for one thing, and I came across another thing, that thing being an old copy of Teach Yourself Danish. And it was only a dollar! So of course, I had to buy it, just in case. But the book arrived today, and I couldn’t help myself, and so I read the preface and general introduction. Having done nothing more, my only comment is that the book reports that the language shares a huge number of loan words from German, as well as a large number of words sharing the same root as similar English words. Thus, anyone with a knowledge of English and German already has a leg up in learning Danish. Well, isn’t that convenient.

Today was another day of Russian. I started copying out the exercise sentences from lesson 52 of Russian without Toil, but was diverted by other things after four or five of them. Specifically, I copied out the condensed table of Russian noun declensions from Terence Wade’s Comprehensive Russian Grammar onto a sturdy piece of paper (think Iversen green sheets).

After that, I copied out the first four or five sentences from Stranitsy Istorii by Syrov. Thanks to Iversen providing the full publication details at the HTLAL forums, I was able to find the book. It’s a history book designed for learners of Russian with all of the accents marked. Anyway, after copying each sentence, I looked up all of the words and figured out the declensions of things. It was certainly slow going, but it was nice to read the whole paragraph and feel that I actually got most of it (after a fair amount of work). There was one construction I was somewhat baffled by, though:

Советскую страну населяет более сотни различных народов.

As best as I can make out, this comes out something like:

(The) Soviet country [accusative] inhabit more hundreds of various / different peoples.

I get the gist of it, but the usage of более has me a bit puzzled. My dictionary shows it as meaning “more.” However, “more than” seems to be более чем, and so the lonely более evades me somewhat.

Google Translate spits this out for the above sentence: