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Post by rikita on Dec 25, 2010 13:24:35 GMT
not sure how to really name this thread... what i mean is, learning a language for which not many good materials are available, but in a surrounding where it is spoken - except that no one around is used to giving explanations about their language...
it can sometimes be quite frustrating. i find a malayalam word in a book but can't find it in the dictionary. so i ask someone "what does that mean?" - and they explain that sentence to me. i point at the word and ask whta the word means. again, they explain the sentence. i ask what type of word it is, a verb, a noun - they don't know what verbs or nouns are. i ask what the basic form is, what the dictionary form is... if i am lucky, i find out in the end, sometimes i don't...
(and keep in mind, this is a language where words are often "stuck together" in texts, which makes it harder...)
i suppose part of the reason is that no one ever got into the situation of having to explain their language to a non-native speaker... you should see the looks i get when i go into a book shop and ask if they have a malayalam grammar explained in english. usually they end up offering me english grammars explained in malayalam...
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 25, 2010 15:01:03 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Dec 25, 2010 18:44:20 GMT
When I trained to be an English teacher, it made me realize how sloppy most native speakers' speech is, in terms of taking into consideration foreigners. Just one English example: saying "It's over" instead of "it's finished." Obviously, both forms need to be learned, but for a start it is common courtesy to think to use the least ambiguous word -- "correct" instead of "right," for example.
And this is what taught me to say -- in any appropriate language -- "could you please use different words?" instead of just saying "could you please repeat?"
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Post by bixaorellana on Dec 26, 2010 0:41:39 GMT
I say, "I don't know that word" or "I don't understand what that means". It really helps to build vocabulary and not to fall behind in a conversation by misguidedly pretending to be following when you've actually lost the context.
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Post by rikita on Dec 26, 2010 2:41:30 GMT
well, malayalam seems so far the biggest challenge i have in language learning. quite different from learning spanish or romanian or swedish... tv would be good if i was here for a longer time (and with access to my own tv) but right now i don't understand enough... that is generally one of the biggest problems - people speak very fast and words get slurred together, so unless they speak very slowly i don't understand a word (and even then, i often don't).
thanks for the links! i will check them out soon, though anything that needs to be downloaded won't work at least for now, as i am still on a limited download program. but i will have a look during our trip, if we go to an internet cafe, and then see what i do...
well, but i do have a vocabulary of several hundred words now (actually about 1000 i think) but the problem is to use them... i sometimes speak malayalam to the kids at school but as i am supposed to teach them english, i use english with them more often. i should try to speak more often to the school's cook and to the care taker though, they both don't know english...
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Post by lagatta on Dec 26, 2010 13:41:22 GMT
Yes, the problem is the limited resources available for that language. The other languages rikita mentions are European; Romance or Germanic languages so not nearly as difficult. I don't even know what language group Malayalam belongs to. Oh, going on line I see it is most closely related to Tamil. I know Tamil speakers, but the languages separated to long ago for that to be of any help.
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Post by ninchursanga on Jan 27, 2011 15:35:11 GMT
It sounds like it is an agglutinative language. Then it would be useful to find a list of pre- and suffixes the language uses, so you can take the words apart and find the stem of the word.
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 27, 2011 15:44:22 GMT
"Agglutinative" is a new word for me. Would German and English be agglutinative languages, for instance?
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Post by ninchursanga on Jan 27, 2011 16:19:07 GMT
No, not at all! Non of the Indo-European languages is aggluntinative. The Finno-Uiguric languages are, Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish.
It works like this:
Let's say in English: "I came (to my) home."
In Turkish this would be "Evime geldim."
Ev-im-e gel-dim.
Ev = house
-im= possesive suffix, first person singular
-e= suffix indicating the direction "to" (versus 'from' for instance)
gel- = verbstem 'to come'
-dim = suffice that indicates past tense, first person singular
If you want to change the person or tense, you change the suffixes. Prepositions indicating direction are often indicated with suffixes and Turkish therefore has 6 cases.
For example:
"Ev-imiz-e gel-iyor-uz." - 'We are coming home."
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Post by rikita on Jan 27, 2011 17:18:44 GMT
yeah it is agglutinative - though it goes beyond that and also sticks main words together (like, two verbstems, or two nouns, etc.) - i wish it were that easy to find a complete list of suffixes... there are no malayalam grammars written in english, and the dictionaries are also quite obviously geared at malayalam speakers...
as for agglutinative langauges, i always tried to explain it by this quechua example:
wasi = house
wasiy = my house
wasipi = in the house
wasiypi = in my house
wasicha = little house
wasichay = my little house
wasichaypi = in my little house
etc.
well the difference between agglutinating and flective languages is basically that agglutinating languages use unchangeable (aside from such thinks as vowel harmony) endings with a specific meaning, put in a row, while in flective languages the whole word is "flektiert" (not sure how to say that)... (btw some flective languages have six or seven cases too...) though some flective languages are more analytic, and prefer prepositions and similar...
like, häusern - which part of this is plural, which is masculine, which is dative? it is basically a new word formed to express all of it...
btw, afaik agglutinating languages tend to have a subject-object-verb sentence order, and tend to put definition before the defined (i to shop going man saw) while flecitve languages tend to prefer subject-verb-object and defined before definition (i saw the man who was going to the shop)...
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Post by ninchursanga on Jan 27, 2011 18:40:16 GMT
The subject-object-verb order has the advantage that as a speaker of an agglutinating language one can decide at the very end of the sentence, depending on the reaction of the other person whether for instance you've really seen something, saw it a long time ago or had no intentions to see it at all.
At least that's how it works in Turkish.
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Post by bjd on Jan 27, 2011 19:40:11 GMT
To comment on the original post of Rikita's about learning from non-teachers. I can understand that it is very difficult to do so, especially from people who have never thought about the language or how it works.
When I first started learning Spanish, it was from a friend who was a native speaker (Argentina), but never seemed to have learned the grammar of the language. Since I had always learned grammar + language, I needed to understand the reason why something was said in one way and not in another and she was incapable of saying more than, "that's the way we say it".
I ended up learning grammar off the internet and including stuff I knew from learning other Romance languages to figure things out. Although of course, there are always things you just have to memorize, like irregular verbs.
Now that I can get by in Spanish, I find that I have become lazy about the grammar and I should really do more grammar exercises.
Of course, this is not an option for Rikita and Malayalam.
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Post by rikita on Jan 28, 2011 13:57:04 GMT
yeah well, but i keep working on it... i have figured out a few things, but i think to really learn this language i would need several years of living here...
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Post by bixaorellana on Jan 29, 2011 4:19:03 GMT
Thank you for that explanation, Siduri. You too, Rikita.
It's such a logical way for a language to evolve, you have to wonder why all languages don't work that way.
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Post by hwinpp on Feb 1, 2011 3:33:10 GMT
Siduri's explanation reminded me of my studies... I'd put all that stuff right at the back of my head! ;D
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Post by Deleted on Feb 1, 2011 8:45:34 GMT
I am always fascinated by the translatablity, or not, of things like jokes from one language to another, since often the punch line is based on the words building up, e.g. "I saw a big..... fat.... hairy...." etc. In languages where the adjectives come after the subject (like most adjectives in French), jokes in that form do not work.
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