Surface Languages

I have been working on Surface Texts, an online foreign language reader designed mainly to help me learn Italian (and Polish). The gist is that you can import texts (internet pages), click on words to have an immediate translation, and then test yourself using flashcards.

I wanted a reader that worked exactly as I needed (and was free), and being a programmer the natural thing was to make my own.

Naturally, anyone else can use it as well.

It is not yet complete, but I hope by the end of next week (providing I can retain focus) it will be useable. It works now, but without flashcards – which kind of limits its purpose. So I’m going to add these asap and then spend sometime actively using and tweeking the site to make it just as it should be.

I am an apple d00d, so I’ve ensured that it works well with an iPad. (This caused me some headaches as Safari on the iPad doesn’t work in exactly the same way as either Safari on a Mac, or other browsers. Ho. Hum).

You can see where I have got to here.

For any fellow programmers, it makes extensive use of localStarage, so any browsers or pads that lack that particular facility (and some do) won’t be able to use it. I’ve used localStarage as I didn’t want to faff too much with server side programming with this project. There will be some (export of files and so on) but not much.

Helpful comments or e-mails much appreciated.

Peace,

MoOnFaCe.

Kind (normally) people e-mail me periodically, with all sorts of helpful comments, suggestions and so on for Surface Languages. Thanks doods. I appreciate it.

I attend a weekly Polish class, and every now and then we are set homework, and every now and then I do it. Having left this to the last minute, I was just settling down to start (and finish) said homework, mentally girding my loins as it were, when I received an email with some rather cool suggestions for this site. Thanks. The idea is sparkling and I will certainly add it at some point in the future. Sadly, this line of thought has derailed my focus, and the Polish will have to wait. Perhaps, this is why some people learn languages quickly, and some dawdle? Who knows.

So, I am a programmer. A geek at heart. I can write assembler and twiddle bits. (I think the parroty error joke is hilarious). Ha!

But still, I have only so much spare time and I am working on another top secret project. And so this (uber cool) addition to SL will have to wait until after christmas. Or possibly longer.

Don’t read the next bit as it is really to help me remember what I am doing:

Use PHP and not Ruby. Installation of the Ruby environment is schifo.
Use Sqlite and nothing bigger to start.
Don’t get distracted by this amazing watch app that I’m itching to write.
Keep is Simple (Stupid). KISS. Let us say it again. KISS.
Get something working quickly.

It is the watch App that might derail me. I am by trade a games programmer and this idea is the dogs.

Ph34r my l33t coding skills!

Focus.

Peace,

MoOnFaCe

One of the things that interests me is learning a little bit from a lot of languages. I don’t mean in the hyper-polyglot type of way but more a snippet here, a word there, a greeting, a rhyme, how to say hello, maybe count to ten and so on.

Another thing that intrigues me is learning slightly more than a snippet, just to get a feel for or idea of a different language, and again I don’t mean necessarily learning a lot. Some of the most useful expressions (hello, goodbye, how are you doing?), counting to ten, and some very basic grammar.

I’m keen on the idea of sufficient basic grammar to be able to modify phrases from phrasebooks, munge them together and make new ones. I.e. a few basic verbs (present tense only), possessives (my, your and so forth), maybe a demonstrative or two, articles and some simple sentence structures.

And so I’m currently learning what I can about Brazilian Portuguese during November. So, to recap, in a short period of time, a good (or at least enjoyable) approach is to learn useful expressions, very basic grammar, and specific expressions that you are likely to need.

If for example, you are travelling to watch the World cup in Brazil your group of specific expressions might include football related phrases and eating, drinking and travelling type phrases.

If you are hanging about with your Portuguese mates, then maybe your group of specific expressions will include phases to amaze and amuse like ‘England are going to win the (football) world cup’.

Hmmmm. Well, who knows.

As I’m not travelling anywhere, only have a few hours to spare, and am just interested in learning a bit about the language, I’m just going to learn some useful expressions and some key grammatical points.

Naturally, I will get translations completed where appropriate – as can be seen by the deliberate mistake on the SL home page where I link to a Brazilian course that doesn’t yet exist. I hope somebody else will find these useful in days to come. One of these somebodies will probably be me, as once we move into December I will almost certainly forget what I have learnt.

Probably retaining only a snippet, a word or two! Hmmmmm.

I’ll leave you with a *snippet* of Polish, which is after all the language I’m supposed to be learning. Maybe it is true – I lack focus ????

ślimak ślimak pokaż rogi
dam ci sera na pierogi.

Peace,

MoOnFaCe

I’m now on Day 58 (or thereabouts) of the Assimil Polish course.

The Assimil courses consist of 100 lessons which are tackled in two waves: active and passive. The passive wave involves listening to the dialogs, reading the notes and becoming familiar with the translation and source language. The active wave consists of reproducing the dialogs – either in writing, aurally or both, starting from Lesson 1.

The active wave makes a lot of sense, as if you can reproduce these short dialogs, then you will be going some way to internalising some of the key grammatical language structures.

The active wave begins with Lesson 50, and so as well as studying lesson 50, you reproduce Lesson 1. The following day, when studying Lesson 51, you reproduce Lesson 2 and so on …

I’ve now been doing this (active and passive waves together) for eight days.

The initial lessons are quite short (although suddenly become longer and more complicated) and I haven’t had too much difficulty with writing them out so far, as well as saying them aloud.

However, I am unable do this and study a new Lesson, in thirty minutes, and I would say that an hour is more reasonable, and even that is probably not enough if you want to make rapid progress.

As you might guess, I’m now spending an hour a day to go through each new Assimil lesson (passive) and actively learn the corresponding earlier lesson (active).

If you are using Assimil, or thinking about doing so, do not expect to be able to complete each lesson in half an hour. I don’t think it is realistic unless you have studied another similar language, and I have never looked at a Slavonic language before.

Enough of the negative, after day 56, my overall view of Assimil is extremely positive, with a few caveats which I will write about when I’ve finished my initial run through of the course.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m still not chatting in Polish, and I don’t have a language partner. I suppose I still don’t feel it is productive in the sense that I can’t say enough to make it worthwhile. I like to chat. Soy un loro as they say in Spanish. Yeah. Fine. I can tell someone where I live, if it is raining and so on (in Polish), but that is not a conversation. I still don’t know enough Polish to have a conversation – in any real sense of the word.

I’ve spend an hour and a half chatting in Spanish today, but I like to talk about anything and everything. I don’t feel that intercambios at this point are a particularly helpful way for me to make faster progress in Polish. (I have reached the point in Italian, where I should speak more than once a week but I don’t have time).

At this point, faster means remaining focused on Assimil to be able to express myself (even badly) over a sufficiently wide enough range of topics that I can have a conversation. And I don’t mean ‘I live in … ‘, ‘I have a dog’!. Of course, the best way for passive knowledge to become active, is to use it, which in the case of speaking a language means of course to speak it!.

Peace,

MF

Pinky slept at the bottom of the bed for the last 19 years. His was a gentle soul.

I’ll miss you, little chap.

Moonface

Polish is choc full of prepositions.

Prepositions are words such as ‘at’, ‘to’, ‘in’ and so on. Do and na, are Polish prepositions and both used in the sense of to, as we do in English:

I am going to the shop.

There is only one version of to in English, and this doesn’t vary. So, ‘I go to the shop’ and ‘I go to the swimming pool’ both use the same preposition.

Polish uses a different preposition depending on the place to which you are going. This means that the first decision you must make is do I use na or do I use do?

Idę na basen ‘I go the swimming pool’.
Idę do domu ‘I go the house’.

Luckily, there is a rule to help you remember this, although with exceptions that we will come to later.

Big open places tend to use na. Small places tend to use do.

So, if you are going to a shop (a small place) the preposition do will be used.

Idę do sklepu ‘I go to the shop’.

So, if you are going to an airport (a big place) the preposition na will be used.

Idę na lotnisko ‘I go to the airport’.

Exceptions

There are of course exceptions. For example, poczta post office (not really big) uses the preposition na. But they are easy to remember if you associate the place with somewhere you know of, or have been frequently. Whenever you think of poczta, think of the largest post office that you have ever been too.

After a while na will stick. After all, post-offices are really huge aren’t they.

Cases

You can’t escape from cases if you want to speak Polish. Each preposition uses a special case, and the noun that follows the preposition must be put into the required case.

OK. Let’s start with the easier of these two prepositions.

Na + acc = to

Na uses the accusative case

The Accusative Case

Now the accusative case for inanimate objects, and this naturally includes buildings, swimming pools .. for masculine and neuter nouns is identical to the nominative.

The nominative case (the dictionary form) is the form of the word you find in the dictionary. It is the form that you learn. It is the form without any changes being made to the ending.

So, basen in the nominative and basen in the accusative are the same! Easy.

This leaves feminine nouns. In Polish, these mainly end in a. Change the a to ę and you have the accusative.

So, poczta in the nominative becomes pocztę in the accusative.

There are exceptions, but Polish Made Easy is about trying to be 90% grammatically correct with a few simple rules. The next 10 percent requires time, talking, practice and grammar books.

Once you know that you need to use the preposition na with a word. You are as we say ‘sorted’.

Idę na uniwersytet. Idę na basen. Idę na lotnisko.

Now, let us move on to do, which requires the genitive.

Do + gen = to

The Genitive Case

I will look at the genitive properly later, but for now do the following which covers many feminine and neuter words:-

If a words ends with an a in the nominative, change the a to a y.

If a words ends with an o in the nominative, change the o to an a.

Otherwise add a u to the nominative or dictionary form.

I’d like to explain the logic I’ve used here …

… for anyone who knows how the Polish genitve works, or who is interested in why this will give you a correct ending in 80 percent of the time. BTW 80 percent is a guess, it could be 50 percent or 90 percent. I have no idea. But when you are starting, this is more than you would achieve otherwise. Honestly, some of the grammar rules are so arcane it freaks me.

There are spelling rules in Polish which prevent a y from following a k or g. So the genitive of Polska is Polski and not Polsky, but essentially (to us English) they have the same sound. If you are speaking, no-one is going to know whether you mentally spell the word with a y or i.

Masculine words ending in a consonant, either have u or a added to the end, and you have to learn this! However, many ‘masculine’ common places that you are going to go to such as the park or pub, take u in the genitive.

Yes, there are also a lot of exceptions, but this is just to get you started!

Peace,

MF

As anyone who reads this blog will know, I have been learning Polish this year and my progress has been slow. Polish is a complicated language with a complicated grammar, that you need to get to grips with to talk without sounding like

a total numpty or complete muppet.

For the non-native English speakers among you the words ‘numpty’ and ‘muppet’ can be used to describe someone who is doing something rather badly.

It is fine to talk like a numpty, and that is how we all start, but you don’t want to do it for ever.

Grammar is considered by many to be pointless, boring, unhelpful and not to be emphasised. It is not fashionable to talk about it. Grammar is like an embarrassing relative (and I have a few). They are there, but no-one really wants to talk about them too much. And if they do, it is in hushed whispers, on dark nights, around dying embers etc.

For a language such as Polish (and I imagine all the slavic languages), grammar is

very important!

Without learning grammar, you can not construct accurate sentences.

Spanish or Italian (for example) are more forgiving, and I think it is possible to absorb the grammar for these languages without forcing it.

So this brings up a dilemma.

Grammar books tend to overcomplicate, with exceptions that can only be learnt by practice and exposure to the language, and but yet contain too much information. And yet, it is important to learn enough grammar so that you can understand how to make (largely) correct sentences, and to provide a solid foundation to speed up learning.

What I have decided to do, partly to help with my own understanding of Polish, is to write a series of Blog posts on this topic called Polish Made Easy.

These will illustrate the most essential chunks of Polish grammar, along with ways to remember them.

As I understand them!

Everyone’s an expert. And that includes me.

Right?

Peace,

MF