Fremdsprachen ftfw, Foreign Languages Thread Options

[jcdietz03]

I did something like this for Japanese.

This post I wrote is full of fail (like my work usually is) but maybe you will get something out of it. Long story short: Particles are really common in Japanese. It's the big post about halfway down.

[Dr Strum]

What do you mean "really common"? Particles pretty much define Japanese grammar outside of verbal and adjectival conjugations and declensions. A sentence can be constructed without them, but you can say very little (perhaps nothing useful) without particles.

[jcdietz03]

By that I mean pretty much ALL particles appear in the 100 most common newspaper words. The folks over at TJP.com (the link) said they don't think particles are words though.

You can get a raw word list by frequency over at the WWWJDIC FTP site.

This post has been edited by jcdietz03: Jul 20 2009, 02:07 AM

[Dr Strum]

I have heard before that the first hundred words are only a drop in bucket. Half of the words (written) are among the 1500 most common ones and half of the words (spoken) are among the 800 most common ones. I don't remember where I heard that. Even so, 100 is only a small fraction of the 1500 most common written words in Japanese.

This idea is more or less true of any language. The article escapes me now, but in the chart the average was that the most common 2000 words would make up 75% of the corpus.

[P.P.A.]

I think I am starting to learn Dutch. I visit the Netherlands every year and it's very easy to learn, so not doing that someday would be sort of a waste.

[jcdietz03]

Swearing in Japanese.
Well THAT didn't take long. Reading Inuyasha (a children's comic book!) will teach you fun words like ちくしょう (dammit) and てめえ (impolite "you"). It would probably be awhile if you tried learning that using a textbook.

Am I wrong? Is ちくしょう not a swear?

Hey, I was wondering if anyone has tried Bing translator. Is it any good?

This post has been edited by jcdietz03: Jul 24 2009, 05:25 AM

[Dr Strum]

So next spring I'll be able to take some language classes again. Taking my fourth semester of Russian and second of French. And this December I'm taking the JLPT 4.
Currently reviewing for that.

Je suis trés impatient.

[Dr Strum]

اسم من ذاک است

I'm in your web blags, screwing up your text directions.

Started taking Persian. Pretty cool. Surpisingly hard.

[P.P.A.]

Something I wondered is if learning Tajik—a dialect of Persian—first would make it easier. Tajik is written in Cyrillic, which is certainly easier to read for a Westerner than Iran's variant of the Arabic alphabet. You could thus learn the language without having to struggle with squiggly lines for letters (or save that for when you're already familiar with the grammar and know a good number of words).

[Dr Strum]

Orthography is probably one of the stupidest reasons to rule out a language. Maybe it's some combination of my skills, interests and training, but a new orthography takes me about a few hours to become proficient enough in to recognize all the letters quickly. The biggest impediment to me right now with the orthography is that most sources print the squiggles in what looks like a 5pt font.

As for Tajik, it split off from other Persian dialects a long time ago, and reflects a purer Persian, whereas the Farsi and (though to a lesser degree) Dari dialects' lexicon reflect the influence of Arabic conquerors and Islam. Learning it wouldn't make for a significantly simple transition to those Persians using Arabic alphabets.

Learning Arabic first would probably make Iranian Persian easier than Tajik would. Additionally, though I don't know the status for Tajik, my teacher has made a point of the fact that spoken Farsi and written Farsi are completely different entities, a distinction made without regard to literary Persian and slang, which only add more levels of linguistic variety in terms of grammar, pronunciation and available lexical entities.

[P.P.A.]

Hm, I simply imagine that learning Arabic is much more difficult than learning Cyrillic, which—just like our native Latin script—is based on the Greek alphabet (both of which only took me a few hours to learn). Arabic/Persian on the other hand, with their up to four often radically different looking variants of each character, depending on its position in a word, and the frequent use of cursive script are very intimidating. Though as I have never actually tried to learn these scripts, I don't know how troublesome it is in practise…

I see, though. I did not know the differences between Tajik Persian and Iranian Persian to be this great, though little else is to be expected after two centuries of Arab occupation, the prevalence of Arabic as a literary language, and as of recent an Arabophile Islamist dictatorship…
(All the more reason for me to look at Tajik first, as a Persian free of Semitic taints; but I can see how it would be impractical.)

[Dr Strum]

They're stupidly easy to learn. Most characters belong to a group which dictates their shape in initial, medial, final and stand alone positions. For example, the characters representing the sounds /b/, /p/, /s/ and /t/ all have this bowl shape: ببب ب
(And here you can see the initial, medial, final and stand alone shapes thereof)
But only /b/ has the single dot on bottom. /p/ has three dots below, /s/ three above and /t/ two above (/n/ with one dot above and /y/ with two below have the same bowl shape in initial and medial but different ones in final and stand alone). So you learn one character's four forms and then the meanings of the four dot configurations. In a way it's similar to learning Hiragana/Katakana in that you learn a shape, and then add two small dots or a circle and the sound changes.
In Persian there are fifteen character groups like this comprising 32 letters. Many of the characters are standalone or only connect on a particular side, or have the same shape in some contexts as another group (as with /n/ and /y/ above), so that also cuts down on what you have to learn.
The only real issue with learning the alphabet is that because Persian doesn't have as many distinct sounds as Arabic but borrows words with exact spellings, there are something like four /s/'s, three /h/'s and two /z/'s, and a word can differ on a single shape with the same sound but have entirely different meanings.