Surface Languages

It has been some time since I’ve mentioned either Polish or Italian in my ramblings, what with the dictionary issues and all. On that note, I’ve added the first one, and even finished the first of four dictionary based games.

So, all is going well on the programming side of things:)

But what about language learning?

At the beginning of this year, I set myself the (arbitrary) goal of reaching the B1 language level in both Polish and Italian. I already spoke some Italian (A1 ish) but not very much and no Polish at all, but SL is about languages, and I should learn them …

So where am I at?  (Don’t write like that kids if you want to pass your exams.)

My Italian is going well. I have a conversation partner and speak once a week. I’m starting to feel more confident in speaking (although with plenty of mistakes), and am starting to get a feel for how the language works. Success breeds success, and I’ve been spending more time on Italian than Polish over the last six weeks or so. Earlier in the year I spent more time on Polish, so I imagine the overall time spent will even out over the coming months.

I’m confident I will reach the B1 standard in Italian before the end of this year, and this will give me a good base going forward.

As an aside, I’m finding Italian grammar more complex than Spanish, but I don’t know if this is because it is more complex or just that I’m more accustomed to Spanish.

And now onto Polish.

Well, I was told by a Polish speaker the other day that Polish was very difficult for English speakers to learn.

I’m not going to disagree with that assessment.

If I had to guess my level, I’d say it is a low A1 – in other words I’m still very much at the beginner level. There is no way (this year) that I will reach B1 or even A2.

Surprisingly perhaps, I feel fine with this. Polish is a difficult language for english speakers to learn for many reasons. It is not impossible, but it is difficult. I am making progress, but slowly. The grammar is hard, most of the commonly used words are completely unrelated to english or romance languages, and there are a lot of consonants. (Actually, that isn’t a good reason for my tribulations with Polish, but there are a lot of consonants. How does this work playing scrabble. Is it easier or harder?)

I only have so many hours in the day, and so many hours to spend on Italian/Polish and while I will reach a good level in both (given time) I’m in no hurry – no tengo prisa, non devo sbrigarmi,  nie jestem w pospiechu (??). It is about the journey, and I don’t feel frustrated with my slow pace of learning. As long as I carry on improving, I will reach my goal.

But as well as this, I think that it is easy to forget how much there is involved to  reach a good A1 standard. I was ‘roughly’ assessed to be A1 in Italian at the start of the year, and I was surprised by how much I then needed to improve to reach A2.

So, I’m pleased with what I’ve achieved so far.

Anyway, it is a nice day, and I’m off to water some geraniums:)

Peace,

MF

It is raining throughout Europe. We (the UK) are having to import wheat for the first time in a decade – (actually I’m gluten intolerant but it is not a good thing).

Wheat crops are being grubbed out and replaced with Barley – because of the rain.  And yet our politicians are still resistant to the concept of renewable energy. You know the sun, waves and the like. When will politicians learn that climate change is happening, and happening now?

We have a bunch of muppets running the UK.

And I’m being charitable.

Really, really charitable.

Additionally, there are paw marks all over the kitchen floor and a slug (quite a big one – probably driven inside by the inclement conditions outside).

Is there any good news?

Yes. I now have an Italian dictionary of around 500,000 words imported into a sqlite database.

This means among other things I can create Italian dictionary aps. But first things first, I’m going to create a dictinoary page on SL and write some neat code to access it and some cool dictionary related games.

Eat your heart out, branded dictionary people.

Peace,

MF

It is June, it is raining and our dog has very damp paws. His paws are like sponges and there are enormous wet paw marks on the floor. Happy days. (I’ll post of picture of said hound soon).

I haven’t posted for a while, and that is partly because my every waking moment (slight exageration) has been spent on trying to create dictionaries using wiktionary (as permitted by the creative commons license).

Why?

I looked into licensing dictionaries to add to SL and the cost is prohibitive. I naively thought that a big dictionary could be licensed for maybe £100 a year. It turns out that the real cost is prohibitive. Add some 00’s kind of prohibitive. Welcome to the real world.

But I need dictionaries …

1. I need them for part of my secret and as yet unstarted project. But dictionaries will be required.

2. I need them so I can create free dictionary aps for iPhone and Android devices.

3. There are a lack of free dictionaries (of a decent size) on the internet for languages with fewer speakers.

4. I want a dictionary page on SL with dictionaries and dictionary games – designed to work well on tables, pads and phones.

And so my only option was to create dictionaries myself. The way to do this is to use the data from wiktionary, parse it using some whizzy coding, create a flat file, index it and create a database.

I started with Italian (as I’m learning the language), and assumed that I would crack this relatively trivial task within days. An hour here. An hour there. Bing. I would have a dictionary.

It turns out, that while the Wiktionary is very easy for a human to read, it is a non-trivial task to write a program to parse it, and spit out a dictionary. In fact, it is a tedious, unforgiving and difficult.

Anyway, I’m a l33t programmer and I have teh skillz:)

So, after a lot of frustration, I have almost written some code to parse the Wiktionary and produce a dictionary.

I almost have an Italian dictionary with hundreds of thousands of words.  And when I do, I will add it to SL. I hope it will be as good or better than any of the expensive branded dictionaries.

It is, as they say, coming soon …

Peace,

MF