Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

Iversen’s Multiconfused Log (see p.1!)

  Tags: Multilingual
 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log Post Reply
3959 messages over 495 pages: << Previous 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 481 ... 494 495 Next >>
tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
China
likeapolyglot.wordpr
Joined 4457 days ago

5310 posts - 9399 votes 
Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans
Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish

 
 Message 3841 of 3959
29 March 2015 at 3:50am | IP Logged 
Combien de temps reserves-tu pour les traductions? Et combien des mots (environ) sais-tu
traduire pendant une heure? Par exemple, si tu décides de traduire un texte en espagnol
vers le grec moderne, quel est le tempo le plus regulier? Peut-être faut-il qu'on
traduise de plus en plus souvent - afin d'apprendre comment on peut formuler et présenter
ses idées et ses opinions élégamment dans des langues étrangères.

Edited by tarvos on 29 March 2015 at 1:17pm

1 person has voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6453 days ago

9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 3842 of 3959
29 March 2015 at 1:59pm | IP Logged 
FR: Il est impossible de le dire - ça depend des langues, du texte concret et son sujet et du temps que j'ai a ma disposition (cfr la loi de Parkinson).

Pour les traductions de quelque chose au Danois le calcul est simple: le temps que je mets à écrire la traduction plus le temps que je gaspille à chercher des mots dans un dictionnaire (et écrire ces mots en marge sur le papier). Mais quand il s'agit de traductions d'une langue à une autre où la deuxième langue est moins forte, le dépense de temps est imprévisible.

Dans le cas écheant j'ai traduit environ vingt centimètres dans une colonne d'un journal typique - et cela a duré presque deux heures. Mais une grande partie de ce temps-là a été monopolisée par un nombre restreint de mots qui ou bien ne se trouvaint pas du tout dans dans la partie Anglais-Indonesien de mon dictionnaire (mais peut-être dans la partie Indonesien-Anglais) ou bien notés avec des traductions qui pour des raisons diverses m'ont parues suspectes.

Pour certaines langues les recherches grammaticales peuvent prendre bien du temps, mais puisque je ne possède pas une grammaire Indonésienne ceci n'était pas un facteur avec ma traduction récente de quelques lignes d'Espagnol en Bahasa Indonesia.

Les traductions ont été considérées presque comme une perte de temps par certains pédagogues, mais elles sont très utiles si on n'exagère pas - du moins dans la direction d'une langue base à une langue cible. On apprends très vite où on a des lacunes dans son vocabulaire ou son idiomatique ordinaires. Si comme moi on travaille beaucoup avec les listes de mots pris directement de dictionnaires on tend a oublier qu'il y a très peu de mots très fréquents, mais les exercices traductrices montrent sans pitié combien ces mots sont importants.


Edited by Iversen on 29 March 2015 at 4:55pm

2 persons have voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6453 days ago

9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 3843 of 3959
29 March 2015 at 4:58pm | IP Logged 
EN: Because of the reference to the late economist Cyril Northcote Parkinson and his law in the preceding message I ended up studying a number of such laws, mostly in English. The original law can be stated as follows:

"Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".

The article about that law in the English Wikipedia is found here, and its sequel, Parkinson's law of triviality (from 1957) is trivialized here. It does discuss the law, but I got the actual quote from this blog:

"The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved."

which Parkinson illustrated by an agenda with three topics: a contract worth 10 million £, a bicycle shed to 350£ and an expenditure of 21£ for coffe to the meetings of the committee. Evidently the first item is passed in a matter of minutes, whereas everybody has an opinion about coffee. My opinion is that the stuff tastes bad, costs too much and is a waste of time, not only as a discussion theme. And I don't have a bicycle right now.

There are a host of other eponymous laws out there, like the Peter Principle, which states that efficient people are promoted until they reach a level where they clearly are incompetent. And there they stay. Or Murphy's law, which has got a number of different formulations, but roughly states that if anything can go wrong, it will.

These laws lead me to some interesting research done by Italians, starting out with equally lamentably late professor Carlo M Cipolla ('Onion'), who in 1976 with some disdain for ordinary levels of political correctness concluded that there are four kinds of people:

Intelligent people, who contribute to society and who leverage their contributions into reciprocal benefits
Naive people, who contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it
Bandits, who pursue their own self-interest even when doing so poses a net detriment to societal welfare
Stupid people, whose efforts are counterproductive to both their and others' interests


These irreverent studies have been continued by others, but the articles are few and far between between all the usual academic drivel about organisation. For instance I have seen the summary of a study, that showed that the people who dominate in commitee work are those who know little, talk much and have a high self-esteem. Those who truly know about the topics at hand tend to be less sure of themselves, and they loose out to the sweet-tongued megalomaniacs. Therefore the outcome of committee work normally is worthless. Unfortunately I don't remember where I saw that totally unexpected piece of information.

Three other Italians: Alessandro Pluchino, Andrea Rapisarda, Cesare Garofalo, added some mathematics to the Peter principle and wrote an article called "Accidental Politicians: How Randomly Selected Legislators Can Improve Parliament Efficiency.". They reached the conclusion that adding a sizeable number of parlamentarians drawn by random from the general population would make parliaments both more efficient and more productive in terms of societal benefits. And no, this is not hinted at any specific parliament - it is a serious piece of scientific research with general implications, and it also applies to promotions within organizations.

I hope I can find some of these texts in Italian, but until then I have found a description of the rather extreme Athenian democracy, which may have excluded certain classes and genders from power, but in other respects operated with true randomness between the remaining citizens. To obtain this randomness the Athenians used a mecanism called the Kleroterion, and I'm going to read about it in Greek.


Edited by Iversen on 30 March 2015 at 1:52pm

2 persons have voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6453 days ago

9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 3844 of 3959
02 April 2015 at 5:34am | IP Logged 
SP: Me desperté a las 4:00 de la mañana y me senté a ver la televisión. En TVE encontré Destino España, y e inmediatamente escuché una cuidadora de animales danesa charlar sobre su trabajo en Marineland Catalunya. En Dinamarca no hay lugares con delfines, y hay algunas personas aqui que están muy en contra de ese tipo de instituciones. . No intento discutir en este lugar sobre sus creencias, ya que esto puede fácilmente degenerar en peleas amargas, pero mi principal preocupación en este tipo de lugares - además de la tarifa - es el ruido infame que también a los delfines probablemente no les gusta. Estos animales realmente están dependientes de su sentido del oído, y la música rock debería ser tan detestable para ellos como el ruido de grandes barcos.

Después hemos visitado otros extranjeros que por suerte han venido a vivir en Catalunya (y generalmente en la bulliciosa ciudad de Barcelona). Ya la cuidadora hablaba de su vida en Blanes, donde yo pasé mi primeres vacancies en Catalunya. Después hemos visitado persones de Alemania, de las Filipinas y otros lugares. Una cosa mencionada varias veces es la diversidad lingüistica de Catalunya - un lugar donde los niños en familias bilingues tipicamente aprenden almeno cuatro idiomas: Español, Catalano, Inglés y el idioma de la padre o madre extranjera, sea lo que sea.

EN: I haven't written anything in this thread since March 29, but that is not to say that I haven't studied - but mostly using methods or exploring topics I have written about earlier or which don't really call for comments - like wordlists.

SE: OK, Могао коментаришем неке астрономске текстовима на српском, које сам проучавао у последњих неколико вечери - као чланку о занимљивом камена на Марсу или чланка о једном инфортунате комете која је мислила да је добра идеја да прође кроз спољашњи слој Сунце (то испарил je).

EN: So much for astronomy in Serbian. But I have also spent a fair amount of time om music, which actually is a late effect of the call for an ebook of my HTLAL "Guide to Learning languages" which I received earlier this year. OK, I duly wrote the book (and still have it lying around somewhere), but didn't find a congenial place to offer it for free, so instead I opted for making a personal homepage to publish it, but found that I needed more content if I were to establish such a thing. So I thought of my illfated paintings, which I started out describing on Youtube, only to find out that few people shared my combined interest in paintings AND language learning. But I already had much of a system showing them, inccluding showing the steroscopic versions I have made of some of them. My Youtube videos would also have to be mentioned, although I don't really liked doing them (and even less watching them later on), and then there was one thing more, namely my musical compositions.

Unfortunately I only have few and old recordings on cassettes, and I don't really know whether the other players in them would even like to have their efforts publicized on the internet - I have lost contact to them long ago. But I set out at least to scan all the musical sheets, and apart from the orchestral works I am through that exercise now- - those compositions have taken up a meter or so on a shelf since time immemorial.

However I discovered that I didn't really like the latest extant version of my first cello concerto so therefore I decided to recompose the whole thing - the first time since 2002 I have composed anything at all, and only the second since the mid 90s, where I basically stopped composing music and playing instruments myself. It took a long time, but was surprising easy - except that I had to watch boring things like snooker on TV to avoid background music. And the last two evenings I have made a piano version of my first symphony - the full score of this work alone takes up 118 pages, so it will take quite some time to scan that and my other orchestral works, but twelwe pages with the piano version is a less overwhelming task to accomplish.

And now I have to turn my attention to languages again - I do not want to see musical composition resurge as a compulsive hobby like it once was. The world is too full of background music too make that a viable alternative to language learning. And now we are at it: I simply hate the almost constant background music of a channel like TVE. Why do they have to cover MY linguistic fodder with sh*t?

PS: I haven't made the homepage yet - and the one mentioned under my name to the left (once the homepage of my travel club) is long dead and gone, but given the hidden traps in the software of this forum I don't want to experiment with leaving the space empty. Some of you may remember that just changing your email address will block your account, and then a moderator has to do brain surgery to revive it.

Edited by Iversen on 02 April 2015 at 6:13am

1 person has voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6453 days ago

9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 3845 of 3959
06 April 2015 at 11:30pm | IP Logged 
EN: I'm back from my Easter holday, which I have spend with my family. As usual in that situation my studying times has been sometwhat limited, though I have managed to study a few texts and watch some TV in other languages than Danish and English. I also found time to paint half my mother's house (the least whitish part) and participate in three excursions to local museums. I even learnt a new use of a wellknown French word: "charme".

FR: .. et remarquez bien: ce charme-ci, c'est l'arbre que les Anglais s'appelle "hornbeam" et les Danois "avnbøg". Et l'examplaire dans le jardin de ma mère a l'habitude de bloquer totalement le signal des satellites Astra a sa parabole tout l'été. Mais pour le moment c'est encore possible de regarder télevision en allemand, néerlandais/flamand, espagnol, portugais brésilien et galicien (entre autres).

POR: Isto deveria ter sido escrito no galego, mas o Português é um parente próximo. Se você escrever em portugisk e adiciona um monte de x de deve ser um especialista para ver a diferença entre o lucro eo galego genuíno. Nesta Páscoa eu assisti ás notícias e a previsão do tempo e vi reportagens sobre paisagens locais na Galiza (o Galicia) - às vezes no espanhol, mas às vezes também no Galego, o que me diverte muito. Tentei encontrar algo semelhante no canal brasileiro Rederecord, mas não conseguiu.

DU: Ik heb ook in geslaagd om tijd te vinden met de Vlaams-Nederlandse zender BVN. BVN betekent "de beste van Vlaanderen en Nederland", wat misschien is een beetje overdreven, maar ik zag feitelijk een uitstekende documentaire over Peter Paul Rubens, schilder en diplomaat - maar niet bijzonder goed bekend als je willekeurige burgers vraagt op de straat (dit is feitelijk gebeurd - met een treurige resultaat).

GE: Die meisten Kanäle auf Astra sind jedoch Deutsch - einschließlich Hunderte von Variationen über die wichtigsten regionalen Sendern wie NDR, WDR und co. Und glücklicherweise verstehen meine Familie Deutsch so wir haben etliche "Tier1, Tier2 und Co." gesehen - nur die Zoosendungen von Köln folgen nicht dieses Muster ("Tierisch Kölsch" oder so was). Wir haben auch Sendungen über berühmte Straßen in den Vereinigten Staaten und über Korallenriffe, Meeresschnecken und Tintenfische geschaut.

DA: Men ser vi da slet ikke dansk fjernsyn? Jo da, men mest lokalsenderne, hvor man har en bedre chance for at blive fri for fjogede københavnske tv-kändisser og journalister med de samme meninger som journalisterne (måske fordi mange af dem faktisk selv er journalister). DR, "Danmarks Radio", har just fejret sit 90-års jubilæum, og det stod helt klart at denne venerable institution betragter sig selv som verdens åndelige centrum og guds gave til menneskeheden. Jeg ser sjældent hovedkanalen DR1 (og heller ikke dens konkurrent TV2), men ét af lyspunkterne er en næsten 70-årig herre ved navn Ryge Petersen, der mestendels bare trisser rundt i sin have og fortæller om sine blomster og kartofler og birketræer. I dens søsterkanal er et af de minst ulidelige programmer en serie med "Bonderøven", der er en landbo med en uudtømmelig trang til at lave gammeldags huse, opdrætte dyr og ombygge sit hus - men heldigvis med en forsonende sans for humor.


Edited by Iversen on 06 April 2015 at 11:38pm

1 person has voted this message useful



Stelle
Bilingual Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
tobefluent.com
Joined 3894 days ago

949 posts - 1686 votes 
Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish
Studies: Tagalog

 
 Message 3846 of 3959
07 April 2015 at 12:38am | IP Logged 
You read such interesting things in your target languages. I find it inspirational that you combine your love of
languages with your love of learning about stuff - it's the perfect combination!
1 person has voted this message useful





Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 6453 days ago

9078 posts - 16473 votes 
Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian
Personal Language Map

 
 Message 3847 of 3959
08 April 2015 at 10:36am | IP Logged 
Some 'stuff' is actually about languages or language learning methods, but most of the stuff about this world isn't. It would be a pity to ignore that part of the universe.

However I did spend time on some language related stuff yesterday. I went by train to a nearby town and back yesterday so I had a couple of hours to spend, and I spent most of that time reading an old Catalan book which I bought in the 70s about the differences between Castilian and Catalan: "El Català i el Castellà comparats" by C.A. Quintana. I would also include the "Dua Bulteno" in Esperanto in the language related categori. I got it by snail mail during Easter, and it is supposed to be a guide to the Universal Esperanto World congress in Lille in France later this year. But I have already read most of the stuff on the site of that congress in March, and it doesn't seem the people behind that event have made further progress towards some kind of detailed program yet - at least not on a level where the results are made public. There are some informations about practical issues and a lot about costly excursions, but miserly me will probably use public transport for that purpose even though people around me then will be speaking French (or Flemish).

From the other category I would like to mention the text about the Langobards in Serbian which I studied yesterday evening, the article about a tattoo festival in 1993 from a deliberately sensationalist magazine in Danish which I (partly) translated into Bahasa Indonesia and those parts of S.N. Kramer's book about the Sumerians which I found on Google books (in bahasa inggris).

CA: Vaig comprar el llibre de en Quintana en els anys 70 durant el temps on va anar als cursos de català per als estudiants del frances del venerable Sr. Magnus Berg. El llibre ha estat escrit especialment per als catalans ensenyats exclusivament en Castellà durant els anys dificils sota Franco i per a altres tipus d'espanyols residint en Catalunya i que querien apprendre la llengua dels indígenes. És útil, però també atabalador de tal manera estudiar les diferències amb exemples en els dos idiomes. I cal sospitar de les tendències normatives de un tal llibre. Com a exemple quan en Jordana adverteix contra l'ús no contemporany del gerundi, però a la vegada reconeix que aqueix es una pràctica comuna entre els catalanoparlants actuals. I perqué? Perqué la construcció "Va caure del tranvia matant-se" es més indicatiu de la connexió causal que la construcció preferida de en Jordana: "Va caure del tranvia i es va matar".

Edited by Iversen on 08 April 2015 at 4:52pm

1 person has voted this message useful



tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
China
likeapolyglot.wordpr
Joined 4457 days ago

5310 posts - 9399 votes 
Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans
Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish

 
 Message 3848 of 3959
09 April 2015 at 2:48am | IP Logged 
Quote:
but miserly me will probably use public transport for that purpose even though
people around me then will be speaking French (or Flemish).


Which doesn't seem like it should bother you one bit, since your French is in excellent
state :)


1 person has voted this message useful



This discussion contains 3959 messages over 495 pages: << Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183 184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232 233 234 235 236 237 238 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 250 251 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278 279 280 281 282 283 284 285 286 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 296 297 298 299 300 301 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 311 312 313 314 315 316 317 318 319 320 321 322 323 324 325 326 327 328 329 330 331 332 333 334 335 336 337 338 339 340 341 342 343 344 345 346 347 348 349 350 351 352 353 354 355 356 357 358 359 360 361 362 363 364 365 366 367 368 369 370 371 372 373 374 375 376 377 378 379 380 381 382 383 384 385 386 387 388 389 390 391 392 393 394 395 396 397 398 399 400 401 402 403 404 405 406 407 408 409 410 411 412 413 414 415 416 417 418 419 420 421 422 423 424 425 426 427 428 429 430 431 432 433 434 435 436 437 438 439 440 441 442 443 444 445 446 447 448 449 450 451 452 453 454 455 456 457 458 459 460 461 462 463 464 465 466 467 468 469 470 471 472 473 474 475 476 477 478 479 480 481 482 483 484 485 486 487 488 489 490 491 492 493 494 495  Next >>


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.5469 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.