languagelearning

I used to have an app called Mearka, which was a trilingual dictionary between Norwegian, North Sámi, and Norwegian Sign Language, notably including uniquely Sámi variants of signs.

However, I uninstalled Mearka at some point, and when I went to re-install the app, I found that it had been taken off the Play Store. Statped reports that "development on the Android version of Mearka has ceased", so... shame that I don't have an iPhone, then!

This means that for Android users, there is evidently only one offline NSL dictionary left, namely Toleio, which has a lot fewer features than Mearka, and also has a lot fewer entries in its dictionary. I can only assume this is because Toleio is a Duolingo-style app with a dictionary feature "on the side", and more specifically Toleio is a reskin of a whole series of apps teaching different sign languages — thus to keep the curriculum more or less the same between the different apps, each app avoids culturally specific signs, and expectedly doesn't teach "vulgar" signs, either. Nor does Toleio include signs like COVID-19, in fact I don't think a single NSL dictionary, online or offline, paper or digital, does — most NSL dictionaries, it seems, haven't been updated in nearly a decade!

And like, you wouldn't think it would be so much to ask for, to have

1. An offline NSL dictionary app for Android, that
2. Lets you scroll through all entries, rather than needing to search for the specific sign you want to see;
3. Lets you slow down videos, favorite them and share them;
4. Includes signs unique to Norwegian and Sámi culture, as well as place names and name signs, vulgar signs, and regularly-updated new signs for current issues.

And if I may be so choosy as to include features I've seen in some NSL dictionaries that I would like to see combined into my dream NSL dictionary:

1. Includes still photos and diagrams, and photos of a sign's referent, rather than just videos;
2. Lets you search for signs by feature rather than just by gloss;
3. Includes glosses in both Norwegian and North Sámi;
4. Includes Sámi variants of signs.

And venturing outside the world of things I've seen in extant NSL dictionaries, it would also be pretty freaking sweet for dictionary entries to have explanations of the etymology and the actual definitions of each sign, like how Wiktionary does for ASL.

And of course, all of this would ideally be FOSS.

Some of these issues are the result of the particular difficulties in making a sign language dictionary compared to a spoken language dictionary, but most of the issues, and the fact that the sign language-specific issues haven't been overcome, is really just a result of the lack of institutional support for sign languages. Like the existing dictionaries for Norwegian Sign Language, woefully incomplete and lacking in conveniences as they may be, are still far more than most sign languages in the world ever get to have the luxury of.

Only done a few lessons and it's much better than the previous app I tried, Mango Languages (it was free through my library). Hello Chinese is much more holistic in its approach, and starts with more simple sentence structure and repition.

这个多少钱？

{本|běn}：这个{苹果|píngguǒ}多少钱？
{店员|diànyuán}：{三块五|... 3.50 yuan ...}。
本：那个呢？
店员：五块。
本：这个{香蕉|xiāngjiāo}多少钱{一斤|per half kilo}？
店员：{两块二|... 2.20 yuan ...}。
本：那个香蕉呢？
店员：三块。你买不买{呀|ya}？
本：不买。我在学中文。

。。。
我：我也在学中文。

As an exercise in thinking about a language, I like trying to translate something a bit silly, that I can't just look up. Even if the result is bad, it tends to lead in interesting directions as I try to move beyond rote memorisation and end up discovering some new aspect of the language.

Today's target was "beanis".

What I came up with for Japanese was お{荏々|じんじん}. As far as I can tell, this is not in dictionaries, but sounds like an existing word, おちんちん, with extra voicing on the leading consonant, and has "bean" in it, though jisho.org gives some other meanings to the kanji.

I have no idea whether this works or is (more likely) just gaijin nonsense, but I can't think of anywhere else I could possibly post this.

(brief pause while I google this)

Mein Gott, I almost found one.

Beware of occasional liberalism but yeah, I was binging through these, they were pretty easy to follow along on even with only a rudimentary knowledge of Esperanto. I notice that the channel originally consisted of what seems to be short segments of actual radio news, before it went inactive for three years, and then started posting new videos in this format about five months ago.

only posting this because i want people to reply with "wow, you don't even use <really good app that I didn't know existed>?"

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/57995993

Hitting the day streak of the year we’re in feels worth sharing for me.

And yes, I’ve actually been learning with Duolingo, along with some other language apps, and speaking with people in the languages I’m learning, particularly Spanish.

Muzzy in Gondoland was originally created by the BBC for teaching English as a second language. The Esperanto version was published by the International Esperanto Institute in 1995.

I learned this from this video (Note: contains 2000 year old bronze phalli) — although it seems like 祖 used in the sense of penis/phallus is a bit of a formal, literary usage, which is seemingly unattested in Sino-Xenic, so this information won't be of much use to you if you're, say, studying Japanese rather than Chinese. So it's only in Chinese where 祖 can mean penis, and only as a very sort of delicate and academic desexualized term for it in compounds like {铜祖|tóngzǔ} ("bronze phallus"), which was the term used in the video. That's my understanding, at least.

It is interestingly enough apparently believed (as one theory among several) that the right half of the character 祖 may in fact originate from an old pictogram of a phallus, "the symbol of the male ancestor"; on the other hand, the radical on the left-hand side (radical 113) on its own already carries a meaning of "ancestor" or "veneration", coming from an old pictogram of an altar.

As for readings, Middle Chinese tsu^X^ bears Standard Chinese zǔ and Cantonese zou^2^. For other readings and other meanings of the character (which are also interesting!) you can check Wiktionary — I've regurgitated enough of that site in this post already.

In any case, "ancestor" and "penis" sharing a character in Chinese reminds me of how in Arabic (and proto-Semitic), "memory" and "penis" share the same triliteral root, ḏ-k-r — that triliteral root, incidentally, gives us the name Zechariah through the Hebrew for "the Lord has remembered", and the Islamic term dhikr through the Arabic for "remembrance".

To be or not to be? Arabic simply said :bugs-no: to verb to be :gigachad-hd:

Yes, we don’t use verb to be (in the present tense).

In Arabic, we have two types of sentences:

If a sentence begins with a noun (or pronoun), that’s a nominal sentence.

If a sentence begins with a verb, that’s a verbal sentence.

Let’s talk about the nominal sentence. It refers to the present tense, and does not require verb to be. It consists of two parts:

مُبتَدَأ

mubtada’ the subject of a nominal sentence (literally means the noun that starts the sentence)

خَبَر

khabar the predicate of a nominal sentence “the comment”. The word also means a piece of news.  

Examples:

أَنتَ أَحمَد

You [are] Ahmad ‘anta ‘aHmad

عَلي سَعيد

Ali [is] happy عalii saعiid

Arabic doesn’t have an indefinite article fyi.

Think of it this way: when you read or hear a sentence that begins with a noun, that is a "setup" and so you'd just wait for the "punchline" i.e. the predicate (خبر, comment, news).

This means you can express a lot in Arabic without knowing any verbs :cool-bean:

Verbal sentences:

A verbal sentence starts with a verb, and has this basic word order: verb + subject + object or complement.

فَتَحَ الكَلب الباب

The dog opened the door fataHa al-kalb al-baab

كَتَبَ الوَلَد اِسمه

The boy wrote his name kataba al-walad ‘ismh

man manna min mannin munna min l-mannaan

Some natives might have trouble understanding it even with the diacritics

This   ّ   is called shadda, it's written above a consonant to indicate that it's doubled. What that actually means is that the consonant should be double the length in pronunciation, e.g.:

فَهَّم

fahham to explain (make someone understand), pronunciation

Here is a calligraphic writing of the tongue twister in riq3a

Who wants to learn about the remaining two short vowels?

Let's talk a bit about the verb aspect of the root system:

Being a Semitic language, Arabic has a derivation system, whereby from a single root (defined as a three-letter combination), you can derive a whole array of related meanings. So from the root 3-l-m علم we get the verbs 3alim عَلِم (to know), 3allam عَلَّم (to teach), اَعلَم a3lam (to inform), ta3allama (to learn), ista3lam اِستَعلَم (to inquire).

Furthermore, the way each of these verbs is related to the basic root 3-l-m علم also helps with vocabulary acquisition. So whereas 3alima (to know) is the simple form verb, 3allama عَلَّم (to teach) is a 2nd form verb (the middle root letter ل l is doubled), and we use the 2nd form for causation. So literally 3allama عَلَّم means to cause someone to know, and therefore to teach. Similarly, ta3allam تَغَلَّم (to learn) is the 5th form, which is a reflexive of the 2nd form. So ta3allam literally means to cause yourself to know, and therefore to learn. And again ista3lam اِستَعلَم (to inquire) is the 10th form, which is used for requests. So ista3lama literally means to request to know, and therefore to inquire.

Arabic has 10 verb forms. You just take the 3 root letters (consonants) and put them in the pattern of the desired verb form, that is the jest of it at least. Each verb form carries an intrinsic meaning in it.

For example, Form III often has the meaning of carrying out an action with someone else.

:meow-knit: DW natives use only one of them, which I think a lot of you already know :meow-coffee:

In this lesson we will learn about ’alif-hamza أ

We learned about the long vowel 'alif ا in our last lesson.

Now here is a fact: there are no words which begin with a vowel! :walter-shock:

Oh you think I’m talking about Arabic? Go ahead, pronounce 'our, if, it, up, I, on'. In English, the sound you make every time you say a word that begins with a vowel is not a vowel sound, it’s actually called a glottal stop. And the reason why you don't know this is because English has no letter for the glottal stop.

In Arabic, the hamza ء represents the glottal stop and, like other consonants, it can be a carrier of vowel sounds. You wanna practice the sound of a glottal stop? It’s the sound you make every time you say a word that begins with a vowel or the Cockney pronunciation of “little bottle” (pronounced without the t’s)

A glottal stop is a catch in the throat produced by holding one’s breath and suddenly releasing it.

:meow-coffee:

Remember: An 'alif at the beginning of a word is always gonna be a glottal stop, never a long vowel, whether there is a hamza ء or not. There are no words that begin with a vowel.

The hamza is transliterated as an apostrophe.

Check the comments for more!

Also who is still actually interested in these lessons?

I came across this answer on r/askhistorians:

The grandparent of Arabic script is the Aramaic alphabet (strictly speaking, it's an abjad rather than an alphabet, since it only has consonants). Surviving early examples of Aramaic are "blocky":

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stele_Salm_Louvre_AO5009.jpg

However, there are joined curvy versions of Aramaic script:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Peshitta_(1).jpg

Many alphabets (and abjads) have two forms like this: a blocky form, often preferred for carved inscriptions, and a cursive (joined and often curly/curved) form often preferred for writing with a pen or brush. We see blocky and cursive forms of Greek:

Blocky

Cursive

Cursive

and Latin:

Blocky

Cursive

Cursive

As noted above, Aramaic is the grandparent of Arabic. The parent is Nabatean:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nabatean_kingdom_language_scripts.jpg

The answer to why Arabic script is cursive is simple: its direct ancestor is a cursive version of Nabatean.

The use of cursive Arabic for writing with a pen is not unusual; this is a feature of many scripts. What is more unusual is a adaptation of the cursive script for carved inscriptions:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DSC07601_-_Merida_Museen_(28107819291).jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Dawadariyya3.png

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Arabic_inscription_in_Jaffa_2_rows.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qutb_Minar_Minaret_Delhi_India.jpg

Square versions developed, which suit some applications well, such as tilework:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jame_mosque_yazd_tilework.jpg

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Meknes_Medersa_Bou_Inania_Calligraphy.jpg

Fundamentally, Arabic script developed in an environment where the pen was important. If carving stone/wood or impressing on clay tablets were the usual methods of writing, Arabic script might have been quite different. The widespread adoption of cursive scripts was almost certainly due to new writing technologies: pen and a suitable material for writing on. In many cases, the "carved" remained in common use for important manuscripts, with the cursive form being an informal script. For Arabic, with a cursive ancestor, the cursive form was pervasive, as seen by the sculptural examples above. These carved examples were auxiliary - the main mode of writing was the pen. As stated in a hadith "The first thing God created was the pen.,

For more on the origins of Arabic script and the cursivisation of its ancestors, see:

Saad D. Abulhab , "Roots of Modern Arabic Script: From Musnad to Jazm", 2007. https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1048&context=bb_pubs

Btw Arabic is an impure Abjad.

Ok real talk, I want to learn Mandarin, but as many have pointed out in the past, Duolingo sucks. What has worked for me in the past is Pimsleur. Are they still good? Looks like you can't get the CDs anymore and have to subscribe and get the app.

:meow-bug: Yalla, let's learn some Arabic :meow-coffee:

خَلف = خَ + ل + ف

This   َ   is a short vowel.

Arabic has 3 long vowels and 3 short counterparts.

:wtf-am-i-reading:

The letter خ "khaa' " is pronounced like the Scottish pronunciation of loch and German ch in Bach - where is the dot placed?

Remember, the ح sound is produced without the vocal cords vibrating and so it does NOT have a dot.

ل makes an l sound

The letter's name is لام laam

ف makes an f sound

The letter's name is فاء *faa' *

This short vowel   َ  

is called a fat7a فَتحة and it is just a short diagonal stroke, which is placed above the letter it follows, e.g. بَ ba (remember, ب is b)

The fat7a   َ   , transliterated as a, is pronounced like the a in 'pat' or 'fat'.

So if you have a "meem" م (m sound) and you write a fat7a   َ   above the م it will look like this: مَ, pronounced ma

ب + َ + م = بَ + م = بَم

بَم is just bam

So خَلف is khalf, which actually means behind.

:comrade-doggo:

ع + َ + ر + َ + ب = عَ + رَ + ب = عَرَب

So عَرَب, study the ع , is عarab (Arab)

Short vowels are not part of the alphabet. The length of short vowels corresponds to the length of most English vowels, and the length of the long vowels is twice that of their short counterparts.

These posts are kinda like sneak peeks, even though I’m putting a lot of effort in them, so it's okay if you feel lost :blob-no-thoughts: but do let me know if you have any questions!

Answer the questions in the comments!

Plug

Marhaba About 4 years ago I made a similar post and ended up teaching @[email protected] for almost 2 years, then last year I did the same thing and taught a couple of comrades. I can honestly say I love teaching my native tongue, especially to comrades!

So I wanna do it again!

I have my own course material, and ofc I make sure to adapt the lessons and study plan to my student’s interests and pace. I try to incorporate Comprehensible Input as much as possible. I believe language learning has to be fun, engaging, and things have to make sense. And believe me Arabic makes a lot of sense unlike English.

Let me know if you have any questions about Arabic or my approach to teaching. And dw about money, really, this is just a 'side hustle' that I enjoy, and so you can pay what you can!

You can dm me from a throwaway account if you want.

Arabic is nowhere near as intimidating as some of you might think, it actually has internal logic and consistency.

And if there is enough interest we can have group lessons as well, let me know if you'd be interested in that.

I'm more than happy to do trial lessons, commitment-free.

what apps do you use to train vocabulary?