Lingq, Arabic Rediscovered, French Etymology, Slowness, Diary

(May 13, 2020): Lingq is such a useful website and concept that I registered there last September for two years. On Lingq you can create your own playlist for a language and add texts with audios. You can mark new and unknown vocabulary so that you can always check the meaning by clicking on it. If you e.g. mark the French word "sinécure" you will find the mark automatically generated when "sinécure" appears anew in another text. When you have seen the word a couple of times and get acquainted with it you can make the mark fade in four grades, from dark to light. The second advantage with Lingq is the quite huge library where you can stumble upon interesting items that you can add to your list. You can also import subtitled videos from e.g. YouTube directly, and the subtitles will appear as a text in your Lingq file. Of course you can edit it, too. It was all this and the variety of offered languages that in the end convinced me to use it and pay some money for it.

For some intense weeks I used Lingq for nine languages (nl, fr, it, esp, port, turk, arab, farsi, greek) to explore the system. After that I used it more sporadically and lost sight for a while, as I was busy with the buildup of my private PDF library, mainly with books on languages and history. Then, instead of expanding my Lingq playlists, I saw myself returning to my own playlists (word documents like the samples in the earlier entries of this blog), refining and developing them instead. I analyzed the reasons and found that I enjoy using my own formatting. I like huge pages, for example, and have Camus' "L'Étranger" on only 34 pages. Also, I like to have my stuff available without going online. It feels safer and more like a possession. The editing is easier, and I enjoy the process of formatting texts. I realized that when I turned to the second book of "Kaamelott", 6 of 36 hours of comedy by Alexandre Astier in tidbits. So, loading everything up to Lingq was, in a way, double work. Also, I am not interested in "streaks", a prominent feature of Lingq, that goes with a perpetual reminder of using your language(s) on a daily basis. And I like to online-hunt for new material, like yesterday when I discovered Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a text with modern translation at the Harvard University website and a guy called Thor who read the first half of the Knight's Tale in Middle English on YouTube. Still, the Lingq library is a lush hunting ground, too, so I will get back to it and don't want to miss it, particularly for Turkish (and Greek) which I didn't touch upon for some time.

Last winter I rediscovered Arabic and spent a month with it, inspired by the new horizon opened up through Lingq. What a wonderful language Arabic really is! On YouTube I found several audio books, among them series I used to listen to in 1989 in Alexandria, like the one the pic to the right refers to, "Qutuuf al-adab min kalaam al-3arab" (Literary picks from what the Arabs said", a half-hour radio show with commented anthologies on topics like "cleverness; humbleness; lauding dogs; Juha stories" from classical Arabic literature; I also discovered Fu'ad al-Muhandis' "Kalimateen wa-bas" (Just a word with you!), a vintage five-minute radio program from Cairo in the Egyptian dialect. I read the new novel of a friend, Akram Musallam, and reread the classic "Season of Migration to the North" (1967) by the Sudanese author Tayeb Salih with text and audio – at least the first two hours, I will come back to that. When I left the job as a university teacher for Arabic in 2001 I did not learn any more until 2015 when I worked in refugee aid, talking a lot in Arabic. English is different, I hear it every day in the news, in films and articles/books that interest me. The thing with Arabic is: You can be on a high level and still be lost with certain texts and dialects. It is always a challenge. On the other hand, medieval texts are far closer to the modern language than in European languages. For example: While German has an orthography since the Grimm Brothers (1854), Arabic has one since the advent of the Quran (610) or, at the latest, with the grammarian Sibaweih (d. ca. 796) whose large grammar book is valid and quoted until today. The language of Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi in his eleventh century essays is quite easy to understand for a modern Arab, for example.

I did not write in this blog in nine months, a lot happened ... My last station was Italian, three weeks. I analyzed Sciascia's police story "Una storia semplice" (1989) and a learners' story called "Mistero all'Abbazia" (Mystery at the Abbey), also produced a verb chart with the different conjugations and some irregular verbs. Subsequently I enhanced my French verb charts and created two parallel ones for Spanish and Portuguese for comparison – the latter two have two more conjugations, I had to use landscape format for the pages. Again I turned to the French textbook "L'Italien sans peine", and I love this book. It does not confuse me, on the contrary, here I can learn to distinguish French and Italian. "Un 'autobus affollato' n'est pas un autobus affolé!". Or this enlightening remark: "L'italien utilise comme forme de politesse la 3^e personne du singulier et le pronom féminin Lei (à peu près comme, dans la France de la monarchie, on s'addressait aux rois : Sa Majesté recreva-t-Elle Ses conseillers dans Son appartement ?)". This is why I plan to use an Italian textbook for Spanish at one point.

For learning some particular French words that simply won't stick in my head, like "écraser" and "affolé" I found a good new method: etymology. In these two and other words there is an overlap of meanings which makes it hard to get the hang of them. In "affolé", there are two roots involved: Old French "foler" (oppress, mistreat, maim, mutilate) from vulgar Latin "fullare" and the word "fol" (crazy; bad, mean). One of the interesting early uses since 1690 was or has been "aiguille affolée" (crazy needle) for non-functioning compasses. Concerning the verb "écraser" I never understood when it means "to flatten, press", e.g. pressing one's nose against a window pane, and when it means "to run someone over (with a car etc.)". The etymology says that the verb appeared in 1560 in the sense of "to flatten, to deform through pressure", followed a hundred years later by the reflexive "s'écraser" (to get killed through a pressing force) plus some lateral meanings that are not important here. The root is Middle English "to crasen" (to break into pieces, flatten) and English "to craze" in the sense of "to crush, scrunch, squelch" with a probable Scandinavian origin. Of course, you cannot scrutinize the origin of every word like that, but you might be familiar with the phenomenon of simply not being able to memorize the meaning of a particular word, especially when it has different overlapping or hard to combine meanings. Tracing original meanings can also provide memory hooks.

When you know that the French word "récif" (reef) comes from the Arabic رصيف ("rasiif": today = pavement; platform of a train station), it will surely help to learn the word, in particular when it comes with an epiphany – in this case I was watching a documentary on corals, heard the word, had a hunch, looked it up, studied the etymology, and yes!

My last point for today is the pain of being so slow in understanding and learning while spending so much time with it. I had a full year of extensive French, like five hours per day and more on average, and OK, I do understand a lot more than before, but I am still so far away of being fluent or even good. Sigh. Sometimes I think my Arabic is insufficient and even my English is crap. Well, crappish. Sometimes. Of course, as long as I don't speak and don't write it is like watching chess games without playing: You don't learn about your own limits and development. But still. So I will at least have to write in the next languages I want to become fluent in: French, Dutch and Italian, my immediate neighbor languages to the West and the South. I am not a fast learner, that's for certain. Sigh again. At least I can say that my methods get more and more refined. I practise something similar to shadowing (repeating bits aloud you just heard) by identifying with the voice I am hearing in the audio. When you imagine that it is you who is speaking, only with an extension, so to speak, you can concentrate better, particularly on pronunciation. But also on content.

There is a Chinese proverb I read in one of Agadmator's chess videos. It is about chess, but it also relates to language learning: "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." So we got to involve ourselves in one way or another. I know this, of course, and wrote about it in this blog, too, but in this condensed formulation I find a new point of departure.

PS one day later: There were two more things happening yesterday. Firstly, I discovered the Italian news outlet promosaik.org [content changed, 2023] which has interesting articles in both Italian and English. So when you open them in two windows you can have them next to each other on the screen with an extra tab for the dictionary (as a native German I use Leo). I only read one medium-sized article and used the dictionary only about five times, when the translation left questions open or when I was more interested in a particular word for some reason. It was very effective, a real boost, so I will do that regularly now. An outstanding other multi-lingual news site is voltairenet, it comes in unbelievable 18 languages: arab, czech, germ, greek, engl esp, farsi, finn, franç, ital, nl, norw, pol, port, romanian, russ, turk, chin. This means you can use it when you are a Russian learning Polish or a Turk learning Farsi, for example. Not every article is translated into all of these languages, but the material is quite enormous and the translation standard is high. Note that I only refer to the linguistic aspect of these sites, not the political one. These are not mainstream media (and thank God for that). I had not been interested in these sites before as they don't provide audios, and I had been audio-focussed in my hunting sprees.

Secondly, when yesterday I wrote "I want to become fluent" and reconsidered all the effort (huge fun, but still effort) I found a need for change. So in order to get into the swing I watched polyglott Benny Lewis' TEDx talk on Rapid Language Hacking from 2013. Then something clicked. Not that Benny's urging to speak the target-language was anything new to me, but there was a change in me, so the meaning of his words changed. My aims became clearer: I want to be able to express myself, to understand news articles and to fairly understand news audios and street talk in French, then Italian, then Dutch; and, if there still is some time left, in Spanish, Farsi, Turkish and Portuguese. After the reformulation of my aims it did not take long until I decided to try something new: to start a diary in French now – and some time later one in Italian. For Dutch I need more time. While understanding a lot, the written words are still strange to me. A diary! Full of wonderful mistakes and bad style, ridiculous in parts, therefore secret, a diary, a diary.

Focus Periods, Babel Confusion Debunked, Levels, Steps and Lateral Moves

(September 1, 2019): This is a Spanish weekend, I focus on it. On a focus day or weekend like this I sometimes resume the Wörterkiste (see below), sometimes I create a small grammar from a book or two out of my 300 or so language material PDF stock. At other times I learn letters and the pronunciations of Russian, Hindi/Urdu, Hebrew or Greek. This weekend I spend solely with Spanish TED talks (and this blog entry). There are four Spanish TED texts prepared and analyzed and six more prepared, but not yet analyzed. By "prepared" I mean the extraction of text and translation – from TED itself or Google translate -, the formatting and the conversion of the video into an mp3. By "analyzed" I mean the comparison with the translation word for word, sentence by sentence, so that for one time I can deeply understand each sentence, even though I will certainly not always understand the same sentence later. Important is the precedent and also the routine: For once at least I did understand it fully or nearly fully. Because this is my final aim: to understand fully. So I practise that. Sometimes there are bright moments where you understand far more than usual for some minutes or even only seconds. These intervals will eventually become longer and happen more often.

Is it not too much or in any way detrimental to learn ten languages at the same time? Actually, when I count there are twenty-four languages I am dealing with, plus some lateral turns to some other interesting languages. And no, for me, at least, it makes perfect sense, particularly as there are no pressures whatsoever, no tests, no immediate necessities. When I am with a new, difficult seeming languages like Greek, or even Spanish with my humble knowledge, and then return to, say, French, I am tempted to think my French is really good. I have an Italian textbook in French, and when I read a couple of pages my French knowledge was as if a seven-year-old explained something to a four-year-old while feeling really grown-up. Like above: As if I knew French. It gave me confidence and a boost. (Wow, you have learned all this, compare it with your Italian!)

Besides, it is interesting to tackle the meta level, i.e. the learning process. How do we acquire language skills? I think one can focus on things better with several languages because one does not want to lose time or to repeat inefficient methods. Reversely, efficient methods and materials can be taken over. For example, if you like the program "Easy French" on YouTube, you can smoothly switch over to "Easy Italian" and a dozen more languages. When you google "pronouns portuguese" You will discover useful websites that also provide grammars of other languages. TED talks I use in eight languages, see below. Or: When you find out that YouTube gives you the opportunity to listen at 3/4 speed and at half speed and that your mobile allows at least half speed – which sounds as if the speaker was on barbiturates, but it's quite effective for distinguishing the words in fast speech which Spanish often is – you can use this information for all your languages and try it out. Recently, I came across the number to words converter/translator from HTMLStrip which is an amazing tool. You type in a number like 135 and select one of a hundred and thirty-five (yes, 135) languages, say, German, you'll get: einhundertfünfunddreißig. Immediately, I checked all of my nl, fr, it, es, po TED talks (turk, gr, fars to follow) and replaced all the (useless) numbers, but put them above as a reminder, like this: einhundertfünfunddreißig¹³⁵. – To sum it up: With a new language you will know straight away how to start, what to look for and how to accumulate a stock of sufficient material in no-time.

What about mixing up languages and getting confused like Babel? I do have this nagging doubt, too, and thus monitor my learning in this respect. Like, when I do Spanish and then I do Portuguese and Italian shortly afterwards. So far it is OK, but I do not mix Spanish and Portuguese on the same day, that would be too much. Also, in focus weeks I will not look at a similar language, but maybe at a very different one for an evening or an hour. Normally, when I am in a particular language I do not think of the others. I focus on the material, not on the sky, so to speak. Maybe the trouble will start later, I don't know. – It is different when I talk. When I collect my Farsi for a short sentence to some acquaintance in the street there might be Turkish words surfacing in my mind instead. But this is because I hardly talk my languages at this stage, knowing, however, that an activation of this passive knowledge will be much much easier than starting from scratch. Plus: Whenever I have the opportunity to speak – and be it a single word – I do. A couple of weeks ago I met a Sorat (Syrian/(Neo-)Aramaic) speaker and remembered "hamzimmin" and "itachrin", and he was really amazed and I laughed and it was fine. I wanted to look up the video I listened to twice to recall the meanings of these words :-) It's OK, I think the video is no longer online. For an hour I had been in that language, like taking a bath in a sea abroad.

Steps. It is about steps and then levels, for each language. Small steps, smallest steps. A six-hour day with Spanish is a step. I can feel how my Italian is much better than my Spanish. In Spanish I still chew on easiest words, and the pronunciation is more complex and deviating from the written version. Following a written text with translation is relatively easy, though, even in Portuguese. I do not think much about steps and levels when I am at it, I just enjoy the beautiful strangeness of my language of today. At one point, the need to see the conjugations of verbs and other grammar things will appear. At another point one will feel the need to go through grammar systematically, or one reads some grammar without the need and rediscovers many things one has just experienced in the texts, like preposition-pronoun-compounds or the like. This can be huge fun with unexpected déjà vus because it is like a subsequent structuring of the chaos in the head without much effort.

Once we understand that we are limited by the time of our terrestrial presence and that we will never know as much as we want, it becomes easier to relax and spend an hour or two with a language we never had any relation with. I think I did this about ten times now, things like Irish (a Celtic language), Armenian (an independent branch of Indo-European, saw it on "Easy Armenian"), Old Egyptian, Old English/German, Sorat, Pashto ... It is like trying out a new restaurant. My metaphors are to express the number one factor for succesful learning – as opposed to this idiotic school learning – which is joy. The formula question thus is: How do I combine language X with my feelings of joy and entertainment? When you found your answer, you've got everything it takes.

By the way: I just re-read this whole page and its predecessor, the Farsi blog, and realized that it is "only" three years and three months back that I rediscovered language learning. Before I had been confined to German, English and Arabic. The rest had died off, it wasn't much, anyway. And today! This is so different.

And another PS on Dec. 20, 2020: There is an article called 30 Expert Tips for Learning Any Language Fast and Easily, written by Ben on the website "Learn Medical Spanish". It is worth while comparing the 30 tips with your own experience.

Music as a Dictionary + Nine Levels of Knowing a Word

(August 14, 2019) Reading this sentence in the article 24 Polyglot Experts Reveal 2 Most Useful Tips To Learn A New Language [middleburyinteractive.com/blog/language-learning, link expired, 2023]: "It's best to listen to dialogues than songs, unless you want to learn to sing, because if you want to be able to talk, then learn how people talk", my horse and I had a jolly good laugh. Teddy Nee in Taiwan wrote that, and he has a point, of course. I simply laughed because Teddy ran over music with a lawn mower. He speaks and learns several languages, among them Medan Hokkien in the "speaks" section. Yes I know, I had to look it up, too. So, time for the magic of music!

The gentleman on the left is responsible for my fluent English. Voilà. At the age of eleven I became first interested in Elvis' music, and ten years later I was pretty fluent in English. In retrospective I would say the main reason was love for his voice and his music. That's the love factor, immensely important in language learning. Love is the most powerful resource and bursts all measures if necessary. Also straight-forward is the repetition factor. You listen to a song until you know every aspect about it by heart, and then you still listen on. And it is not that you want to learn anything, you just want to listen to this – whoever the artist may be in your case. Factor three is more specific, it is about the glue between word and music. The two melt into something new, something much easier to remember than mere vocabulary, even poetry. Because it is so pleasant, rich and evocative together.

Elvis recorded about 710 songs of which I know about 500 really well. Each song contains from 40 to maybe 200 words, including difficult, poetic ones. The Beatles recorded 213 songs (+ 100 live releases etc. after break-up) and my whole musical world at 21 may have included 2500 English songs, mostly 50s and 60s music. And now comes the dictionary bit. Even in school I started to use it. When the English teacher asked: What is the preposition after the verb to cling? ... a program would start running, rattling in my brain box, flashing through the internal lyrics dictionary, cling ... cling ... "It's not clinging to the rocks and ivy planted on their columns now that bind me", ah, OK, Gentle On My Mind. Three seconds, reasonable result. (I made this example up, but it went something like this.)

So when I had I real go at French not so long ago, one of the first things to do was to find as many Jacques Brel songs as possible (172), translate/analyze them and listen to them often because I love his music and voice. The rest of my music-based French dictionary is fragmentary: some Yves Montand and Edith Piaf, didn't get round to delve into Léo Ferré's vast oevre yet, and I love Fernandel's "La Bouillabaisse" from 1963. Then there is something in the same category which is non-musical, namely sound effect audio literature like Cyprien's "Épopée temporelle" and even "L'Histoire raconté par les chaussettes". And here, at the latest, Teddy will fully agree again because it is about dialogues and speech. So I admit there is an overlap between the music-based dictionary and the audio dialogue (maybe even monologue) based mental dictionary. I still hold that music has a deeper extra layer.

While thinking about all that in the above-mentioned amusement, I found this aspect of vobabulary knowledge. How well do we know words? How well do you know the word "litter"? Did you know that it can refer to a bunch of puppies? My reason for the question is the effect of the mental dictionary on how we learn words and how well we know them. When, for example, I know an Elvis song, then I usually know the lyrics really well. Not like in these cases when you do know the word, but you still look it up, just to make sure. Really knowing is to mean: Even when your best friend insists that you cannot "throw" a party, that this must be the wrong word, you have no doubt about your Jailhouse Rock that starts with "Warden threw a party in the county jail". No further discussion needed. Except maybe for colloquial developments in the past 60 years.

So let's try to grasp this phenomenon by inventing a scale of vocabulary knowledge from zero to nine:

0. This is the easiest one: You never heard the word and cannot relate to it in any way. You couldn't say which language it is taken from, if it is a noun, a verb or what, and you understand nothing about it.

1. You had some sort of contact with the word and can say something about it. You cannot confidently give a meaning, except for easiest cases like "yes" or "and" or "we".

2. Now you know that "Stein" (pronounce: shtain) means "stone". You have no idea what a "Steinmetz" is, a "Bordsteinschwalbe" or a "Nierenstein" and you cannot deduce an adjective or a verb or a diminutive. On this level you have a fair understanding of the word if it is a spatial preposition or adverb like "in, from, up, down", and if it is a most basic verb or adjective. It corresponds with an A1 language knowledge.

3. You can actively use the word. If it is a simple word you can claim to know it on this level. If it is a complex word you will know more than one of its meanings. When you conjugate a verb or declinate a noun you will still make mistakes and thinking pauses. If it is a verb: You still don't know all the tenses. (A2 language knowledge).

4. On this level, the word is part of your repertoir. When you look it up you recognize it. You have heard and understood the word in different contexts. You have used it several times, maybe only in one specific sense. You might still forget the word in active usage and have to be reminded of it. If it is a simple word you will have a knowledge corresponding to level 7 of complex words.

5. You are firm in the general usage of the word and can give a definition. In complex words like "put" with its dozens of meanings you can estimate the scope of expressions that you still might have problems with. (B1)

6. You know the word, usually including spelling. In more complex cases you might look it up just to make sure. You have seen it in many contexts and shapes. You might not know every usage of a complex word, but you can confidently use it in speech and script with rare cases of mistakes. When you hear the word you do not have to think about its meaning. When someone uses it wrongly you will notice. You have an understanding about when and where to use the word, i.e. style and register. (B2)

7. This is level of an educated and advanced average understanding of the word in the mother-tongue. In case of verbs it contains the effortless ability of conjugation in all tenses and the correct usage of all prepositions in everyday speech and media language. In nouns, too, you know common rarer meanings and exceptional uses if there are some. (C1)

8. Here, you have a deep knowledge of the word, not only a daily usage understanding. If there are rare cases of prepositions with a special meaning, you will know it. You have seen the word in creative literary usage and you are (theoretically) able to use it nicely in a literary text yourself. If it is a rare word you will still probably know it. (C2)

9. You also know the history of the word, some earlier meanings maybe, dialect versions and some cognates in other languages. You are able to modify the word in a pun and to design a derivation, a new word.

TED Talks, Now My Ultimate Language Resource

(August 7, 2019) In the last four months I slid over to TED talks, Technology, Entertainment, Design. This popular nonprofit global thinktank with millions of views and millions of translations in subtitles has caught me. It is a development from the things I did before concerning language acquisition. Maybe (and I really don't know) my real interest is how we learn languages and not the individual languages of choice. What do toddlers do when they do what they do? Don't tell me it is a brain thing a grown-up cannot compensate. I have experienced myself how brain cells of an adult can be newly combined, newly connected. One key element is the subconscious. Learning is a kind of half-aware process. We don't learn words or grammar by focussing on them. Sometimes we do, but usually not. Rather, we listen attentively and then we reproduce. The main thing is not an effort. Let this enter: It is not an effort. Ask them. The kids. They won't even understand your question. In the past months I had experiences of listening to Spanish, Italian and other languages while reading the words, and I understood longer passages without translating, without thinking, just letting the words sink in, amazing. This is not what we learned in school. Far from it. Try this experiment: Write down the year and the number of pages of a book and try to remember the first number, explicitly deciding to forget the second number, e.g. 2006, 278. Just focus on the first number. Forget the second. Yes, it is there, but it is not important. We only need the year. Forget the 278! Sometimes when you see two three-digit numbers you might find that you remember them without the plan to do so.

So TED. Today I think that citybooks (see below) was a harbinger. The multilingual texts with audios are great, but maybe too literary and a bit too abstract for my level. Premature. TED talks bring you into live monologues of about a quarter of an hour (8-20 mins). The length is a plus as it is neither too short nor too long. The subtitles are a plus because most talks have subtitles at least in the language in which they are presented. I saw a Finnish one, though, with only an English translation, without Finnish subs; basically useless for me. Further on the plus side is the authenticity of the pieces. Then the interesting topics. There are very few talks that are boring. So you will want to understand what you hear. Also, there are immediate reactions from the audience. This is not to be underestimated, as you, the learner, want to see yourself within this happy crowd of understanders. Every time the audience laughs or applauds you learn something extra.

What else? You can copy the subtitles as a whole when you see the talks on YouTube. There is this function on the bottom right, when you click on the three dots (...). There you can open the transcript, switch off the time code, and copy all of it. What I do next is to paste it into a HTML document and open it in a browser to eliminate the paragraphs. Next I copy it into my Word document called "TED in Farsi" or whatever the language, underneath the previous texts. Sometimes I find translations to English or German, then I also copy them. If not and it is a European language, I use Google Translate plus one or two dictionaries (e.g. Langenscheidt + Leo), for some expressions Reverso is a good translator.

I analyze the texts in a way that I understand everything and write translations of unknown or unsufficiently known words and expressions on top of the expression in the way shown on the right. There is this "x²" function in Word next to the functions bold, italics, font size etc. Once translated, I listen and read at the same time, checking if I missed a word or if there is something difficult. In the sample here it was a particular pleasure to find this black humor and the dry way it was presented in the finale of the sentence: "Según parece, el consumo de droga en el ejército americano en Vietnam alcanzaba unos niveles tan astronómicos que formaba parte de la vida y de la cultura de allídort, igual que el rock and roll o disparar a la gente pobre".

Farsi can also be analyzed this way. There often are formatting problems with Farsi and Arabic texts because of the writing direction. But this here works well most of the times. In Farsi – and Arabic, but I don't collect Arabic talks – there is the additional problem of standard versus spoken language: Sometimes the subtitles deviate considerably from the original, be it in word choice, word order or grammar. This is a challenge, but in a way it also is an advantage, as you can learn two things at once – given you know the language well enough.

In this manner, I have by now collected and analyzed several talks in several languages: Dutch (3), Italian (3), Spanish (4), Portuguese (2), French (40), Farsi (2), Turkish (1), Greek (1). There is a freeware for converting YouTube videos into mp3s, so I can save the audios on my mobile phone and listen to the talks when I hike through the woods adjacent to my apartment. Sometimes I only listen, sometimes I read and listen. Sometimes also, I mark a word or remove the mark of another. Below you can see my personal TED book with all the texts I analyzed so far. I spent some time ornamenting it with pics like an enthusiastic child (which part of me still is, fortunately).

Can you find all languages in TED? No. Actually, it is not so obvious which languages are available because you cannot filter talks in specific languages. On this page you can see all the languages, some of which have more than 3000 contributions. For my purposes, I am particularly happy with the four Romance languages fr, it, es, pt and with Dutch. I did not find anything in Danish, Swedish, Norwegian or Icelandic, but one in Finnish with both Finnish and English subs. For Farsi and Turkish I need translations (Google is not enough here), which restricts the choice. There are some Turkish talks with Arabic subs, that's OK for me. All in all, there are more than 1000 talks or translations in the following languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Now, those texts are not in the first place meant for language learners, and most speakers will have no idea that their talks are used for that purpose. So it is not easy. When I translated/analyzed Spanish and Portuguese, for example, I seemed to understand a lot, but when I listened to it without the text there was almost nada left. The idea really is to listen very often, maybe ten times. Each time you will understand a little more, particularly when you return to the written text every now and then.

Of course, the TED-based language learner will watch out for speakers with clear articulation, without mumbling and muttering. Maybe even more important is to choose voices you like. Remember the child who loves mummy, including her voice. Her voice calms the child, gives it confidence. And so the child learns, it wants to come closer to the mother (and father etc.). This is significant! For example: Etienne Chouard's French piece "Chercher la cause des causes" is quite difficult because he is getting faster and faster, but I like him, his ideas, approach and his whole presence. So instead of discarding the piece, which at first I wanted to do, I on the contrary focussed on it successfully. (For the same reason, I watch the YouTube channel "Tev – Ici Japon")

Of course, you can also add translations for TED talks in your own language, and this is a good and even supportive way of learning, too. So far, I only produced subtitles for "Français avec Pierre" when I was at a loss with "tous, tout, toute, toutes, touts" and with "de, des, du, d', de la" – after translating the respective videos it became much easier. Right now I am writing subtitles for one of my own videos, a one-hour talk on creativity and art. German and English are finished, Arabic is following – which will take some time due to the cultural differences. Concepts like "sensitization" or "trance" can easily be brought to European languages, but Arabic has its own concepts, unrelated to the Latin tradition.

Toki Pona, the Minimal Language, and How I Discovered It

(Jan 16, 2019) It was twelve days ago. I turned on Paul's Langfocus Channel (YouTube) during my lunch break, being in the middle of analyzing the 82-item YouTube playlist of French TED talks with subtitles. Paul has a nice way of introducing languages and he certainly shares a general love for them. I chose the video by mere accident; it was one of the few I had not watched before. So Toki Pona, OK. He explained that it is an invented language. "Boring", I thought, but let's see. Then Paul said that it is a special language because it consists of only 120 words. Suddenly I was all awake. What? What – was – this? While watching the video to the end I learned with sample sentences that "li" separates subject from predicate, that "e" introduces a direct object after a transitive verb and that you can order multifold compound nouns/adjectives via the separator "pi". But my mind was already detached from terrestrial spheres and going its own way. What – is – this?!

My Background

In order to communicate my epiphany adequately, there are some things to be explained. Toki Pona is a minimalist language, and I am a minimalist artist. That's number one. It has always been part of my art to reduce meaning, material etc. to a minimum, avoiding verbiage, waste and abstraction (Ezra Pound: "No verbiage!"; "Go in fear of abstraction!" – search for the mind-blowing "Imagistes", 105 years ago, London/Paris), getting to the core of things, no mincing of words. Particularly in my poetry and songwriting. Number two is even cooler because both Toki Pona and my way of life are heavily influenced by Taoism. The experimental Bamboo series of 250 one-pagers, for example, the backbone of my literary production, was immediately inspired by Lao Tse.

With number three we are getting to the linguistic part. When I studied Anglistics in Hamburg in the early nineties, there was an interesting kind of movement going on in the linguistics department. It attracted me so much that I soon decided to enter the linguistic rather than the literary department of the branch. In Germany's humanities you usually have one major and two minor subjects, but two major subjects are also possible, and so I settled on Islamic Studies (Arabic + history) and Anglistics. I was intrigued by the innovative Dr. Roger Böhm and Prof. Radden on the basis of my knowledge of Wittgenstein from school days. For example, I learned about case grammar. There were some blokes in recent history who said: OK, we have different sets of cases in different languages, like nominative, genetive, accusative, dative, instrumental, locative etc. Couldn't there be a deep level where all languages meet? So one guy came up with a list of over 100 cases and others thought: Wait a minute! Let's take the minimum number and combine them! So they said: abs (absolutive), loc (locative), abl (ablative), erg (ergative). And then they combined them, like in the sentence: The pirate (erg, abl) handed us (loc, erg, abs) the loot (abs). – I liked that, just as I liked George Lakoff's theories in cognitive science: metaphors, metonymies, prototypes etc. And Noam's deep grammar to begin with. It was all about how language works (in the mind). Lakoff had just published his groundbreaking "Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf" plus follow-ups via a new thing called the Internet, he was my total hero. And in the department, students and staff were collecting everyday metaphors by the thousands. My primary interest in linguistics has always been understanding. Not, for example, coming up with a new theory or making money. The idea rather is: when you understand your own language you will better understand your own mind. We people have these incredibly complex and beautiful abilities to speak and create art. We want to understand what this is all about. I want to know what it does to my mind when I have gathered experience in this language. Will it reduce my thoughts to an essence? Will it bring out the essence of my thoughts? How deep can Toki Pona go? Does it make sense to write poems in Toki Pona? Are there enough "atoms"? Will the expressed thoughts be hollow or vague?

The Garden of Eden So OK, we have (slightly more than) 120 words at our disposal. The first interesting question is: which concepts are NOT included? Taoist question. No day and night – wow – no danger, part, joy, help, anger, peace, friend, sister. This means: even such basic seeming concepts can be broken down, like molecules into atoms. Yeah, OK, they can, but does it work? Well, seventeen years of visibly growing success say: yes. What started as a private game by the Canadian linguist Sonja Lang was first publicized in 2001. Her official book "Toki Pona. The Language of Good" only appeared in 2014, and then the language became a ... what? Community, inspiration, whim without borders, computer language guinee pig, playground for freaks, addictive game? In any case, it obviously works and thrives. Sonja Lang constructed a language similar to the case grammar mentioned above: she combined minimal semantic entities. If you now take into account – as number four – the work on the Wörterkiste (word box) I mentioned in the previous post you will understand why I spent three consecutive days producing a chart of the Toki Pona words, like a taxonomy of chemical elements. I will always remember these days as being a long trance vacation in the Garden of Eden. On the picture above you can see an excerpt of the three-page chart. I spent happy hours shifting the boxes from here to there, giving them colors according to meaning (social activity, body parts, measurements, physical objects, etc.) and adding meanings from different online lists. It was as if I knew exactly was I was doing and what I wanted as a result. It is still being updated, but basically finished.

Entering the inspiring game we can watch how minimal language works, indeed how language works, deprived of all fat, rid of skin and flesh, down to the bone. I translated and posted a flea cartoon on the toki pona facebook page. That was fun. "Fleas" are "pipi lili" (little insect). The translation is: "Mama, why are the fleas in the sky all white?"

I also asked myself how it will be like when you have invented a language privately, and then suddenly it takes off like that. I mean: search for Toki Pona on YouTube alone and you will know what I mean. I listened to the 40-minute interview by Kris Broholm (2014) with Sonja Lang (interview starts at min 5:00), and she explained that indeed the language has developed due to usage. Well, this is what languages do, they develop when they are used. It is hard to imagine what it is like for Sonja, though. Surely an adventure.

Once I came up with parts of a language myself, when I wrote the sci-fi fragment Omega 5. This was long before I even heard the term con(structed) language. But in that case it was not an attempt to construct a full language, I just needed some philosophical terms that were not so well-worn and that combined different concepts.

How to Approach Toki Pona? For me, all languages are different to learn. Toki Pona is special because you cannot turn on a news channel or radio stream. You cannot listen to natives talking in their natural habitat because there is no such thing. So after the collection and ordering of the Toki Pona words I went over to grammar and syntax, using sample sentences and giving them colors again: Noun phrases in orange, predicates in blue, prepositions and adverbial phrases and the rest in green. For the small words I used lighter colors. When you really dig into it you will find incoherences, but for working purposes it is fine. We have little grammar, as there is no (grammatical) singular and plural in Toki Pona, only one case marker "e" for the direct object, no conjugation, no gender, no tenses, no mode except for the imperative. Therefore, it is best to learn with examples and to integrate idiomatic usages in the grammatical features, like the ways to ask questions or to talk about time. Grammar in Toki Pona is syntax-focused and much closer to idiomatic terms than elsewhere. The picture above is an excerpt of a dense page with sample sentences to explain all grammar, syntax and typical usage of more complex words like "lon" or "tawa". So whenever I come across a new idiom or a structure I newly understand, there will be a place to store it.

I still felt unable to find my way around in this language until I had produced a list of Toki Pona compound words. There can never be a real dictionary because it is part of the tp philosophy and challenge to make things up according to context. But there are some very often used compounds you will have to know, anyway. My simple alphabetical list consists of 440 entries now, including some that are not obvious. When I come across a new one I will add it. Reading through the list also deepens the knowledge of some tp concepts and grammatical/semantic relations.

The final element are texts. There are some collections with and without translations online, and I filled some pages and read them again and again as I get closer to the end of my 14-day intense trip. It is true: you can really learn this mini-language to a considerable extent within a fortnight.

Once I browsed Toki Pona links I realized how much is going on. There are dozens, no, hundreds of contributions: blog entries like this one here, descriptions in many different languages, poetry and prose, articles about grammatical details, link lists and meta link lists (this here is the most comprehensive one I found). There is a lot of love in all this.

Now I have arrived, and it is a good feeling. While being on the brink of resuming other languages, every now and then I will see a facebook post in Toki Pona, like the riddle of the day. I will keep on trying out links and reading stuff. It is like a new companion. Also, with this new experience, my other languages are starting to ... change. They seem less complicated than usual. Amazing side-effect.

Try It Out Yourself! There is enough learning material on the internet for everybody. The 12 short videos lessons by jan Misali are a good start, together with these sentence translations and the 76 illustrated lessons by Eliazar Parra Cárdenas. When you feel that Toki Pona is your thing you should get the original book by jan Sonja because you will want to have this book and show your appreciation. (My copy is ordered.) The official website is tokipona.org and there is the extensive tokipona.net. Wikipedia has a lot of material. See John Clifford, too. The new YouTube channel seme li sin? (= What's New?) is posting news bulletins in Toki Pona. With these links you will be able to find your way around and get hold of even more material. There is a lot of motion and development in the field of Toki Pona. It surely is an established language by now and has gone through some minor changes. At the same time, there is a lot left to do for people who want to contribute in one way or another. To conclude (for the time being) I would like to support "Fingtam Languages" (YouTube)'s view that it pays to learn Toki Pona, this constructed language that does not claim to serve as a world language like Esperanto. To wrap it up: Toki Pona is extremely simple to learn, it shows you how language works, it is fun, it brings you to essential talk and thought, and it is quite a phenomenon if ever I saw one.

© Eequor (Wiki)

(Jan 08, 2019) It's been a long time and a lot of things happened. I couldn't keep up with this blog as it would have distracted me from the things I actually wanted to do. So what has happened on the language front since April 2017? Well, I delved into chess and go for a while and found myself affirmed when I heard ex-chess world champion Anand in his Hawaii interview on YouTube, where he stated that chess is like a language. Later I started with Dutch and followed the cute series "Heb je zin?" (Are you up to?). I also began learning Italian on a mild scale, just to get used to the sounds and most frequent words. I went back to the Goethe 2 (Fifty Languages) site and made myself new audio copies: French with Turkish translation, Italian with Dutch, Spanish with Danish.

In 2018 I started thinking about a general vocabulary inventory that can be used for learning all kinds of languages. I developed "Die Wörterkiste" (word box), a book with now around 7000 German words, ordered according to context (e.g. animals, colors, science words). I also created association chains like "In the House", there you walk through the individual rooms and look at the inventory and some verbs. Or "Travel" with travel words ordered partly like a story. For months I had been shifting words and clusters from here to there, reconsidering, enlarging things, melting things together etc. In April I started translating parts of the Word Box into nine languages to check its validity and usefulness. I had time because in my bread job that year there was nothing much to do.

At first, I was going to publish the book as a tool for language learners like myself: You acquaint yourself with the book and then start to fill in the words in your target language as a game or an exercise, according to your personal approach. But then I was not content and felt the need to know more languages before finalizing the Word Box. I should have at least a forth fluent language at my disposal before resuming the box. So I chose French because I had one year in school, then an intense phase in 1993 and at least two more intense phases, all in all with little success.

Thus from May until the end of the year I had an intense French course with at least five daily hours on average. I translated all 172 Brel songs into German and listened to them often. I collected texts with audios, inserted vocabulary where needed and read while listening. Le Petit Prince (5x), Monsieur Ibrahim (4x), Boule de Suif (5x) and many others. Cyprien, L'Histoire racontée par des chaussettes, TED en Français ... I listened to Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir, and to Jule Verne's long novel "Les enfants de Capitaine Grant". I watched documentaries, with and without subtitles, arte, c'est pas sorcier, RT France, comedy, grammar videos and what not. I did not talk, though, and hardly wrote anything. But that's OK, as long as I feel I am learning a lot. I don't need French in my daily life. I just want to understand EVERYTHING about it, that's all.

Toward the very end of the year I slowed down the gallop. This was when I re-discovered citybooks and understood its true value. I took the half-hour text by Cees Nooteboom about Venice and ordered the languages next to each other: English, Dutch, French and Italian. There are high quality audios in all four languages. Here is the top bit of 25 pages:

(April 24, 2017) My French got better. How can that be, as I don't do French, at all? I did, though. Once. Twice. Some intense phases. In one of them I developed a distinctive French identity to boost the learning procedure. You kind of pretend you forgot your home tongue and try to get it back quickly, mais je suis français, alors! Ecoutez, je vous en pris :-)

I just started two languages from scratch, you see. That's why I got more confident in the languages I already dealt with, like good ole French. Or Turkish, for that matter. I relearned to listen better. And to understand foreign words. Better threshold management. Interesting phenomenon, discovered by chance when some French and Tunesian and Maghribi Facebook friends posted videos and news items I followed. How easy to understand! A more than 60% rate. So it is about self-confidence. (Oh, and I almost forgot that by now I got used to teach at length in Arabic in front of my class – I usually have a translator among the students for Farsi -, as complicated subjects as German history, traffic rules or grammatical phenomenons. I don't even think about it anymore, I just do it.)

There is a secret why children between 2 and 5 can learn their language so quickly. It has to do with the identity theme above. Other techniques are better suited for adults, like literature and grammar books. I want to get a bit deeper into the art of learning languages because all of my clients at work are confronted with learning German as one of their three priorities in life right now. So how can I assist them? By sharing, OK, checked, I learn a language, too. By providing them materials for learning, OK, checked, I collected a good pool of materials for refugees on the Flücht-Links page. In some people I see that they need motivation rather than language material itself. So the 'new identity theme' and the confidence experience are useful hints.

(November 17, 2016) This is a free-time language blog, successor of the Farsi blog. It turned out that my interest in languages is or has become more general and more intense. The main reason for that, I guess, is the fact that I have not worked as an artist for more than a year now after 17 years of action, and I need something to fill the void. Language actually is a good substitute. There are many parallels and a similar complexity in languages and art. Besides, people usually look at voluntary language learners with some respect, and, if they are natives, mostly with benevolence and joy. Not to mention the practical value and the personal challenge.

From time to time I will post something here, not too often. The blog serves two purposes: to document my development and some sources, similar to the way one documents the records in sports (and we will get back to this metaphor in a special post), and to write down some potential points of inspiration for you people. There are incredible, fascinating and truly amazing stories out there from the world of language. Did I say 'world'? Pah! If every single of the more than 7000 languages is a universe, what kind of word do we need to describe the sum of it? Let me start by telling you about my first Somali experience, as long as the memories of the very beginnings are still fresh and at hand.

Friday before last I launched my rocket into the Somali language universe and returned unharmed on Sunday night. I met Sam, a man from Cornwell, who explained some basics to me. His wife is from Somalia, and he is acquainted with Arabic. Generally, the YouTube harvest was meagre, not like Farsi. Enough for a weekend, though. This language is different from everything I learned before, a real challenge. It needs a different approach from Farsi. I wrote words and expressions in a word document, some grammar. Quickly I came to music and discovered "Nimcaan Hilaac iyo Heestii Qalbi" (2.3 million clicks today) [YouTube link expired, 2023], found the lyrics, and, after digging deep into the comments of the video, also a usable translation.

After that weekend I came across Mitsurugi's blog 'Nabad iyo Caano' and found that he gave a very useful overview with grammar, vocabulary and texts for beginners, and with the spirit of a student who is able to think as a linguist. Most of the 229 entries date back to 2011/2012. I copied and pasted everything into one word document and at first reduced it from 150 pages to 50. Then I had some extra time due to a one-week vacation. I thoroughly worked on Mitsurugi's paper and printed out a new version every day for five consecutive days, until everything was perfectly formatted, all Somali words in red color, similar parts fused, reduced to the substantial, ordered. The focused occupation with this text gave me a fundament for learning the language. In the end – that was yesterday – I got the whole text on nine sheets of paper, duplex print with two pages on one, 36 pages total. Total working time was something around 40 hours. I kept the previous versions as a souvenir. Tidying up and making order is my life-theme, this is why I can learn so well while doing it. I love it.

Also yesterday I expanded my vocabulary page from half a page to three pages with a total of about 1000 words and English translation. A mini-dictionary in one paragraph: Somali word in red + hyphen + English word + semicolon; Somali word in red + hyphen + English word + semicolon etc. Then I changed the colors of the verbs to blue, adjectives to green, colors to light green and linguistic technical terms in brown.

There is a good grammar out in German, I ordered it, although it is 60 euros. Online I found the complete amazing 'Qaamuuska Af Soomaaliga' (Puglielli/Mansuur, Rome 2012, PDF), a modern Somali-Somali dictionary with 970 pages (!) and a fine grammar section in the end with charts and tables. I am working on that right now, until Jörg Berchem's grammar arrives. I still have some days vacation, today is only Thursday.

I found four online dictionaries: translate.google.com, freelang.net/online/somali.php, glosbe.com/en/so and lexilogos.com/english/somali_dictionary.htm, but I cannot yet say how good they are. I did not need them much yet. Good is learnsomali.com. Then for audios, there is a zip file on mylanguages.org with about 700 mp3s, each with one word or expression or sentence spoken in American and twice in Somali. Seems to be a manual for US soldiers, the choice of sentences leaves no doubt ('Stop, or I will shoot!', Follow our orders!', 'We are Americans, you are safe' etc., but also normal stuff.) There is no written text to go with it, but I don't miss it. I know many of the words from my recent hours of private editing. Yesterday night I listened through it, I think it was more than an hour. (PS on April 24, 2017: After some research I also found the written text online plus several more chapters of audios with PDF. The politics behind the material inhibits me, but I do use it.)

OK, this is where I stand right now. So why Somali to begin with? Well, the next larger refugee nationalities in my surroundings are Somali and Eritrean. Somali is spoken by about 17 million people, Tigrinya (the main language in Eritrea) has less than half that amount of speakers. It also has a complicated script of its own, while Somali today is written in Latin characters. That was basically enough for the choice. Many Somalis speak Arabic, and there are many loan words from Arabic, too. But not a quarter as many as in Farsi.

There are some peculiarities in Somali, like two 'we's, one is 'we without you', one is 'we including you'. There are so-called focus words and classifyers 'baa', 'waa' etc. which put the focus on a specific part of the sentence to highlight it. Grammar is full of small words like prepositions, suffixes and pronouns that fuse with each other and with other words, often with shifting consonants and vowels. For me, this language is far out. It is not similar to any language I learned before. It is not related to Arabic, but shares some significant phonemes like emphatic q, 'ain and emphatic h, all produced deep in the throat. The d sound is close to r sometimes like in India and Pakistan, some other times it sounds like a usual d sound, then again like a voiced th sound as in 'the'. The tone and melody of the words and sentences are much different from what I know. All in all, I am – you can see it – fascinated with this language in a new way. And I can relate to the music, this is important. I don't go much for Arabic music, you see, and this here is close to blues, reggae and other styles that I know from US music. The language is very musical, very oral. The throat sounds and occasional staccatos give it a rough, Klingon touch, but then there is this tender and almost sung overall discourse that embeds it.