I’ve been trialling a rough new Latin pronunciation.
Here’s a breakdown of Classical pronunciation, Ecclesiastical, (Traditional) English, and mine. Don’t take the symbols as IPA, they’re vaguer than that. Obviously the exact qualities are different.
As far as Anki is concerned (or similar spaced repetition software), I personally find them great for specific purposes, but it’s indeed easy to spend many hours with little effect. I can’t imagine learning kanji without such a system. For vocabulary, what helps me a lot, is to add sentences instead of words, which makes it way easier since there is context, and makes it more useful, since you actually read more of the language in the process.
Especially with vocab, kanji or grammatical constructions that aren’t frequently used, it doesn’t make sense to only read books, since you won’t encounter those infrequent things often enough to remember them. The nice thing about a sentence in anki, is that you get reminded of the word, kanji or grammar on a regular basis. I find that I then start incorporating it in my own Japanese as well.
Similar with how I now learn German: I put some phrases that I find interesting in my Anki deck, and find myself using them more often than if I would just be learning vocabulary.
But yeah, I put a lot of effort in creating the deck, and finding example sentences also are a large part of understanding and remembering words. This wouldn’t be there with precompiled decks. Also, I find my own deck to be more precise than most precompiled things.
In the end, though, the only thing that really kickstarted my Japanese / German, is being in a situation where you’re forced to speak the language. With Japanese that was when I spent an evening with my parents-in-law at a sushi restaurant, since they don’t speak English, and with German it really was just the decision to stop speaking English with my German friends. It’s cumbersome and hard, but progress goes fast.
@Allerleirauh, have you ever tried finding a teacher / pen pal / conversation partner to practice speaking or writing with?
Not much more than typing the word. Actually looking up the word, and looking up sentences, or the difference between synonyms, is half of the work of remembering it.
Well, you don’t add a sentence and try to guess what the word is, you try to say the sentence itself, or just read it and judge how fluently you understand it. It’s not about “oh yeah, I recognise this”, but you need to actively read the sentence and get used to the grammar, etc.
For example, I’d add a card with
They were clearing the snow from the sidewalk with a shovel.
on one side, and
彼らが歩道の雪をシャベルで片付けていた。
on the other side. Although I remember after seeing the card a couple of times that “oh yeah, it’s the one about shoveling snow”, for the JP → EN side I’d still read the Japanese word by word actively (you want to get used to the sentence, not just get its meaning, but make it feel natural). In the EN → JP you try to actually say the thing in Japanese. Doesn’t matter if you have the sentence 100% correct, but it matters that you can produce a working sentence with the intended meaning.
The main thing is not to get lazy but to stay active: don’t skip reading the sentence, when you try to say it in Japanese, actually say the sentence out loud, that way you can’t trick yourself into thinking you’re able to understand it without actually doing so.
I also have cards with grammar points. For example, a card with “末に” on the front, then when I click on reveal answer, it first shows me 4 or 5 example sentences, like
(I take them from this site), and then when I click on the sentences, I use javascript to reveal the meaning of 末に, in this case “finally, in the end, after”.
Before I show the answer, I try to construct a sentence using 末に by myself, preferably a new one, and preferably without trying to translate a sentence I already know. It’s not about memorising sentences, it’s about using the word in some context.
Well, don’t
It’s hard at the start, but it gets easier quite soon. You’ll have the basics covered quite quickly, and can expand from there. I also think it’s slower to only read and listen. My English really got better quickly after travelling and having to actually speak it, far more quickly than in the 10 years of studying it and seeing movies / reading books etc.
Oh, ok, we have completely different systems then. It’s useless to even try.
For English in my case the main learning was 2 years of reading and listening. And writing and speaking is just an afterthought.
I can write justification for why it makes more sense but who cares. It’s better to agree that we have different paths.
Funnily enough, my mom says that when I was very little I started to speak later but kinda already well. Compared to some other kids who started talking or more like babbling incomprehensibly earlier. Not that I can check, but I wonder.
I don’t know, in Anki you can spend like 7 seconds on the card on average, it’s pretty damn quick, even with repetitions.
Well, if you feel like you’re stuck, but also don’t want to accept advice from people who don’t feel stuck trying to learn the same language, then I guess it can’t be helped…
What, should I accept any advice whatsoever even if it clearly doesn’t suit me? Come on, you write it as if our relative subjective feeling of progress somehow places you above me.
It’s something you sometimes notice in go too. If someone expresses their dissatisfaction about the progress, anyone regardless of their rank and experience get to give advice as if they’re masters of the universe.
I didn’t mean it like that. You say you’re feeling stuck and describe what you’re doing right now. I tried the same thing you did, learning lots of vocab, but personally found it didn’t work so well, took a lot of time and had limited effect,just like what you describe.
I’m trying to be helpful and share what I started doing differently, and how I currently don’t feel stuck doing it my way, but it feels a bit pointless if the reaction is just “that won’t work for me, I think my way is better for me, but also it’s all pointless anyway”
It’s like someone complaining they keep dying in capturing races, and someone recommends that tsumego helps with becoming better at reading, and the response is “I’ll just ignore that advice, it’s pointless to even try”.
Our learning tactics should always depend on the language structure.
If you have a language where “an open door” , “open the door!”, “someone just opened the door” and “is the door open?” are the same word, then you need to learn vocabulary.
If you have a language where “the small fish eats the large cat” is perfectly logical without any piranhas involved, then you need to learn grammar.
We must adjust our ways. Even the tried and tested strategies may fail us when we tackle a different language.
Buying a light-reading action paperback and a dictionary worked for me in German (for my purposes) but it didn’t go so well with Chinese. Learning vocabulary worked well enough for French but left me in deep waters with Russian. Watching movies and reading paperbacks worked wonders for English but not so much for Spanish. The lesson I’ve learnt is to adjust and adapt. I think I’m making real progress when I forget my “stratagems” and focus on the language at hand.
“an open door” , “open the door!”, “someone just opened the door” and “is the door open?”
I’d translate these to Latin as:
porta aperta (door - is open)
portam pateface! (door - you open!) or portam patefacite! (door - y’all open!)
aliquis portam modo patefacit (someone - door - just now - opened)
apertane porta? (open - right? - door)
“the small fish eats the large cat”
Nominative / accusative distinction: the fish takes the nominative. Plus by default the fish is masculine and the cat feminine. So we can rearrange the words if we like:
piscis parvus (the small fish) felem magnam (the large cat) edit (eats)
but also
felem magnam piscis parvus edit
And since this seems pretty unusual, perhaps we want to stress edit by bringing it to the front of the sentence: edit piscis parvus felem magnam!
I was watching Glen and Friends Cooking and chanced on this discussion of the meaning of the world apple in Early Modern English.
tl;dr pretty much any fruit could be called an “apple”, not just in English but also in other European languages.
See English pineapple, French pomme de terre (“apple of the earth”, potato) and Italian pomidoro, (“golden apple”, tomato, from pomi d’oro). The root of the last two, pomum, could again mean any kind of fruit in Latin (malum was more specific, and Malus – the form denoting the tree – became the genus name).
In the English of, say, the 1600s, Glen tells us that an eating apple was called a pippin and a sour cooking apple a quodling. Presumably a cider apple was a quodling as well.
Apparently these 16th / 17th C. Jesuit missionaries to China mention Go in their writings, including in Latin, in which they call it magnatum ludus, “the game of the largest (territory)”.
This is in contrast to Thomas Hyde, who titles the chapter on Go in his 1694 work De Ludis Orientalibus Libri Duo with the name De Circumveniendi Ludo Chinensium, in English On a Chinese Game of Surrounding.
magnatum ludus looks to me as if it should mean “the game of the leading citizens / of the nobles” (genitive of magnates). That sounds more like a description of who plays it. Do you have the context the words occur in?
From page 90 it turns out that ludus latrunculorum is (Chinese) chess. But there’s something on p. 91:
gravissimum inter eos ludi genus est huiusmodi. In alveo trecentarum cellularum plures, ducentis calculis colludunt, e quibus alii candidi sunt alii atri. His calculis alter alterius calculos procurat in alveum medium relegare, ut reliquis deinde cellulis dominetur. Hunc ludum avidissime arripiunt Magistratus, & saepe maximam diei partem ludendo consumunt; nam inter ludendi peritos horum integrum ludus unus tenet. Qui huius ludus peritus est, tametsi alia nulla re insignis fuerit, ab omnibus colitur, & evocatur. Imo nonnulli etiam eos solitis sibi ritibus magistros legunt, ut ab iis accurate huius ludi rationem ediscant.
Their most serious game is as follows. In a grid of more than three hundred cells they play with two hundred stones, some white some black. With these stones one player manages to banish the other’s stones into the middle of the grid, so that he controls the remaining cells. The magistrates are wild for this game and often spend most of the day in playing it. For between skilled players (horum?) one game takes a whole day(?). A person skilled in this game, even if they have no other distinction, is courted and invited by everyone. Indeed some even take them as teachers (solitis sibi ritibus?), to better learn how to play,
This is also what I thought, but I went with the translation of a Latin professional that I’d talked to on Discord.
I would’ve definitely considered “the game of the magnates” as a possible translation. It even appears in Hyde: magnum Chinensium ludum qui a magistratu & magnatibus.
Reminds me of my father-in-law, who would talk in Japanese with the occasional English word mixed in, but since he’s not that good at English these would always be the most elementary words of the sentence. Extra confusing, since the word sounds like a Japanese word at first, before one notices it was an attempt at English
