Confessions of a language addict's Blog

Learning to Read Chinese Characters – Another Resource

G Barto — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:43:53 +0000

This weekend, browsing in Barnes and Noble, I ran across Traditional Chinese Characters: Learn & Remember 2,193 Character Meanings by Alan Hoenig. There’s a simplified version as well. In both cases, the introduction acknowledges a debt to Heisig’s Learning the Kanji, and the debt is pretty profound. That means if you like Heisig’s approach, these make for excellent books. The thing I like about Hoenig is that he feels a little more streamlined than Heisig. You spend less time memorizing stories and the focus is more on how the elements of the character fit together. If you want to start knocking off characters for reading recognition quickly, this is great as long as you start putting it to use before you start forgetting the associations (as they aren’t as strong as Heisig’s, but also might not take as long to assimilate).

One really nice thing about these books, a production of EZChinesey.com, is that you can find out if they’re right for you before you buy. Go to the website and you can download a PDF of the pages covering the first 100 characters or so. If you find it working for you, buy the book from Amazon. If you don’t, all you’ve invested is a little of your time. I ordered my copy today.

Saving Aramaic

G Barto — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 00:54:37 +0000

Recently, a friend forwarded this article on efforts to save Aramaic. Now I see that NPR has done a story too (mentioned on this HTLAL thread). However, if you want to learn a little Aramaic yourself, it’s not too late. There’s a blog which teach snippets in short posts. Just keep going through the archives and you’ll find everything from how to make short sentences to key Biblical quotes: LearnAramaic.blogspot.com.

Writing for computers, writing for people

G Barto — Sun, 24 Feb 2013 20:46:49 +0000

Of late, I’ve been taking a computer class on C, and doing a little side-study of Go and C++. Most people know about the importance of writing your code so that the computer can understand it. But it’s also important to write your code in a way that your fellow humans can understand it. By the comments you insert and the way you format your code, you can either create a nightmare of gibberish that does only the last thing it was doing when you compile it or a structure on which others can build or from which they can take pieces to create new things. Just as literature has allusions and quotes at the chapter heads, a coder often makes use of others’ ideas in new ways. But for that to happen, the code has to be written in such a way that you can see what’s going on it.

This is also something that crops up in our use of ordinary language. When we “transcribe” a speech, we don’t usually capture all the “umms” and “ers”. And if it’s a transcription of a speech or something else being put out for public consumption, only the cruel scribe will leave in all the “likes” and “y’knows” or punctuate unfinished sentences to suggest that the speaker lost his train of thought and had to start over, as opposed to elucidating or rephrasing for clarity. In short, the system we use for talking to each other also needs polishing up for someone else to understand it.

In learning a language, one of the toughest elements is getting the hang of the way people actually use the language, as opposed to the way they claim to use it. And one of the toughest things for someone who learns the spoken language is to get the hang of what you do and don’t write down and what you need to rephrase. So whether you’re learning a human language or a computer language, always be on the alert not just for the rules, but also for the conventions that help people know that they’re on the same page.

Learning by doing

G Barto — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 04:23:31 +0000

There’s no question that some people learn better by sight (visual learners) or by hearing (audial). But at some point, learning requires that you practice the skills you want to use. I wrote earlier about the value of typing in programs so you get used to physically typing the key combinations that may be unfamiliar but that you need to get right for your programs to work. Lately, I’ve been finding the same thing with Egyptian: I’d gone a few weeks into my course and I stalled. Now, for two weeks, I’ve been methodically copying out all the exercises, looking up the recommended steps for writing simplified versions of characters as I go. It’s another form of “act as if…” If you go through the motions of being a scribe, you become one. So as you work on your language, or anything else, make sure your practice makes you work through the mechanics of what you’re learning – how it comes together – and then your thinking and your automatic memory can work together all the better.

More Assimilating

G Barto — Sun, 25 Nov 2012 22:57:49 +0000

Some time ago, I did an experiment to see just how much I could learn with an Assimil course when learning with ease, as the books are titled. It turned out I could pick up a fair amount of Alsatian, at least for passive use. Now there’s a group experiment at HTLAL. If you’d like to see how a variety of people do with Assimil courses for different languages, you can read the log here.

Last time, I wrote about Python. But then something came up in the middle. I signed up for CS50x, a Harvard computer science course through edx.org. The course is mainly using C, with a bit of PHP and JavaScript to come. It’s been years since I waded through a C course, but the little bit I picked up is not entirely forgotten. So I’ve adopted the method of the Teach Yourself Python the Hard Way, by taking pains to physically type in all the programs as they come up in the outside text for the course. And again, the things you get in the habit of typing come much faster than those which are read, then cut and pasted.

A Different Kind of Language Learning – Python

G Barto — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 20:34:48 +0000

I recently picked up Learn Python the Hard Way: A Very Simple Introduction to the Terrifyingly Beautiful World of Computers and Code (3rd Edition) by Zed Shaw. Shaw’s approach to teaching you Python is to have you set up your computer to program in Python, then have you type in program after program and see what it does with a bit of guidance along the way. Says he:

At first, you will not understand anything. It’ll be weird, just like with learning any human language. You will struggle with words, and not know what symbols are what, and it’ll all be very confusing. Then one day BANG your brain will snap and you will suddenly “get it”.

One of the things he emphasizes is the value of making mistakes, typing in code wrong and having to debug it so that you can get a clear idea what is and isn’t important in making the program run, and making sure you really understand what you’re supposed to be typing. What’s striking though is that phrase, “just like any human language,” and joined up with the idea of “BANG“. It puts me in mind of my first time in France, where for two weeks, I knew all the rules and seemed to make sentences okay but then, one day, I was suddenly speaking French without thought or effort because I’d just done it enough that that was how my brain worked.
I recently did something similar to this with Sumerian, working through each passage in Hayes’ A Manual of Sumerian Grammar and Texts and copying it down. A lot of the passages were like this:

For God So-and-so/His lord/King So-and-So/King of Certain lands/Built this temple/rampart.

Phrases like “nitah kalaga, lugal Urimak, lugal Kiengi Kiurik” (Strongman, King of Ur, King of Sumer and Akkadia) get pretty ingrained in the memory after you’ve been doing this for a while. In a sense, the key may be “varied repetition”. That is, if you repeat or write the same phrase over and over, it becomes a mantra and becomes too automatic. But if you repeat or write a variety of sentences – be they inscriptions or lines of code – that often contain the same elements, then what you get familiar with is mixing and matching those elements.

I should mention why the author says his book teaches “the hard way.” He makes the point that we often look for an easy way, but that what is easily understood doesn’t necessarily stick. So for him, the hard way – exposing yourself, over and over, to what you need to know until it sinks in, is actually the easy way in the long run. Just so, you can learn a language quickly, but only if you are putting everything you learn to use by really speaking and/or reading and writing so that your newly found knowledge has time to become a part of your thinking.

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If you want to learn Québecois…

G Barto — Sun, 07 Oct 2012 20:23:08 +0000

If you speak French, but want something more exciting than that dreary Parisian accent and all that goes with it, why not give Québecois a look? Actually, there’s long been a good reason not to… decent materials are virtually non-existent.

Alexandre Coutu, known to HTLAL members as Arekkusu, has made an effort to fill the gap with Le québecois en 10 leçons. You can preview the first lesson here. And you can buy the book from Lulu here. Note that the book is in French, and you’ll need an intermediate level to read it. If you want to learn to speak like a Quebecker, here’s your chance!

Self-rate your language skills

G Barto — Sat, 29 Sep 2012 16:38:33 +0000

A little while back, I wrote about the question, Do you really want to be fluent? Here’s a chance to see where your language skills now stand. Just remember, C2 isn’t your automatic goal. If you only need to be a B1 to enjoy your language for the purposes for which you learned it, then a score of B1 is your indication to focus on maintenance and take advantage of being able to use a little bit of time and brainpower for other things.

Click here for the link.

(via Polyglossic)

Learning Ancient Languages

G Barto — Sun, 09 Sep 2012 23:50:43 +0000

I’ve previously written about the University of Texas’ Early Indo-European OnLine site as the place par excellence to get started with ancient Indo-European languages, especially languages like Avestan, Old Persian and Tocharian where resources are otherwise scarce. If you want to venture outside Indo-European, Polyglossic mentions Lexicity as a great place to click around, seeing what you can find. It includes Akkadian, Aramaic and Ugaritic (as well as Indo-European languages like Gothic, Greek and Sanskrit. But no Sumerian or Hittite, alas.

When grammar sketches serve you well

G Barto — Sat, 04 Aug 2012 17:53:31 +0000

The other day, I got The Ancient Languages of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Aksum, which collects a handful of articles from the larger Cambridge Encyclopedia of Ancient Languages. I got it, in particular, for the article on Sumerian, which gives an abbreviated grammar. Very often, when people start out in a language, there’s a temptation to look at a simplified sketch of the grammar. But in this case, I’ve found that it’s after working through 30 Sumerian texts or so that I’m getting the most value. Working through Hayes, I have found some of the material on verb formation to awfully ponderous, but it accounts for what is going on in the particular forms from the readings. Had I come to these forms with a generalized idea, I imagine I would have been quite baffled as I tried to fit them into the simple and elegant pattern I had learned at the outset. But coming to the grammar sketch with Hayes almost finished, I could see pieces of the puzzle falling together and could simultaneously take stock of how the generalizations made sense of things and why the exceptions would make learning the Sumerian verb the way you learn Latin paradigms problematic. In other words, sometimes the quick understanding of a simplified presentation of grammar would be misleading while the identical presentation is edifying if you’re using it to impose some order on what you already know.

* * *

Just in case Sumerian isn’t obscure enough…

In the text mentioned above, one of the entries is Elamite. Like Sumerian, it is a language isolate – no known relatives, past or present. It was spoken in parts of Iran and at the edge of Mesopotamia in a timeframe not entirely dissimilar from that when Sumerian, then Akkadian, ruled Mesopotamia (indeed, the Sumerian king Ur-Namma was said to have known some Elamite himself). Resources for Elamite appear to be scarce, even compared to resources for Sumerian. But if you speak Spanish and you want to dig into transcribed texts (with aids for grammar and vocabulary), there is an excellent site out there: Textos elamitos. I wish I could find a comparable site for Sumerian. If you haven’t yet started your obscure Mesopotamian language explorations and want something a little more off the beaten path than Sumerian, this site is a great place to begin with the Elamite language.