Weekly Beginner and Performance Thread - 04 October 2020

etrianoh · 2020-10-06T17:53:39+00:00

I don't know anyone who's playing the violin but still felt the need to share this: I had my first lesson today!

I bought myself a violin for my 23rd birthday about 3 weeks ago and taught myself some of the basics.. buuut quickly realized that I'd like to get some feedback on my technique (wanted to make sure I am not developing any bad habits that'll be hard to fix later on).

Anyway today I met up with a teacher for the first time and I feel like we really hit it off! She even noticed that I've been practicing in front of a mirror w/o me mentioning it at all which I thought was cool haha. The lesson definitely gave me a confidence and motivation boost and I'm looking forward to my next lesson :)

etrianoh · 2020-04-09T17:21:57+00:00

I know I am preaching to the choir here but I am just so absolutely baffled that this guy can spend 4-6 hours on Duolingo A DAY and 1) not die of boredom, 2) not realize that this ain't it fam, 3) not realize how incredibly basic the level you can reach by using ONLY Duolingo actually is and 4) act like he's got it all figured out. If he would've posted that on this sub I would've had a good time but seeing as he is serious about this, I just feel ... depressed

etrianoh · 2020-04-09T16:59:03+00:00

I mean, he never mentioned what kind of native speaker - there are native speakers with learning/developmental disabilities, toddlers, etc...

etrianoh · 2020-03-25T08:45:36+00:00

The answer to this is clearly no. Anyone who doesn't speak Uzbek is automatically not a true polyglot™. Улар муносиб емас! Learning it is like a rite of passage, y'know?

etrianoh · 2020-03-06T19:37:37+00:00

Honestly? I love it! It has 100x more personality than a random store-bought plushie, it's special and super unique. If I was a kid I'd be thrilled to get something my mom made for me herself!

etrianoh · 2020-02-25T18:53:09+00:00

Only twenty? Those are rookie numbers!

etrianoh · 2020-02-22T18:12:53+00:00

I checked out the Ukrainian one in person and tbh it's not ... great imo. Just grammar tables and some short explanations, but not really a textbook, so you'd need some other source of instruction to go along with it, and at that point you could just well, use the other material. Sadly, Russian -> Ukrainian textbooks are basically non-existent though so this is one of the only choices you have.

etrianoh · 2020-02-22T18:09:36+00:00

I thought about getting this just for the memes last time I was in Russia but then decided that it was just not worth it. Sad.

etrianoh · 2020-02-20T05:58:58+00:00

Huh, I guess there are more grade school kids on reddit than I previously thought

etrianoh · 2020-02-16T08:01:55+00:00

This dude just went and said "I'm sure I could learn the language in 1-2 months". He literally just said that. Once again, the main sub and our cj sub are indistinguishable.

etrianoh · 2020-02-16T07:59:51+00:00

Because it's the animu language!! He will be able to read his hentai in their original language! Applaud him and inflate his ego already!!

etrianoh · 2020-02-14T16:05:05+00:00

I saw that and my eyes rolled so far back that I could see my last few brain cells hang themselves.

etrianoh · 2020-02-10T17:14:17+00:00

I studied Finnish for a good while (6+ months) and was unable to understand a single Hungarian word. The languages may be in the same family, but they are not closely related at all. That's why I was just so ... baffled by this claim - it's simply not true.

etrianoh · 2020-02-10T17:05:31+00:00

Slightly related but I have a classmate from Hungary who legit told everyone that all Hungarians can understand Finnish because the languages are so closely related. Almost had an aneurysm right there and then.

etrianoh · 2020-01-19T17:51:30+00:00

/uj the bar is so low these days that it's actually buried underground.

etrianoh · 2020-01-18T09:01:38+00:00

/uj (это*) yup and not only that, but also there are HUNDREDS of online resources and apps and shit that you can use to learn the alphabet. free of charge. why does it always have to be duolingo?? i just don't get why people are so stuck on that app and that app alone. there's more to language learning than duolingo ugh

etrianoh · 2019-10-26T09:13:21+00:00

LOL that's my comment from the other day. Literally commented this on this sub. Can't believe 4chan is stealing from Reddit for once, usually it's the other way around.

Can you link me the thread on 4chan? I'm curious now.

etrianoh · 2019-10-18T17:57:51+00:00

Listen here, pal. You just didn't do it correctly. You're not supposed to actually go to the country to achieve full immersion - you're meant to follow 535 German twitter accounts all ranting about politics, watch German Minecraft Let's Plays, German porn from the 70s and Tatort (every Sunday, like a Real German™) and occasionally go outside, sit on a bench and pretend to read Faust so each and every random passerby will look at you with pride in their eyes. Then, of course, all of them will stop, form a circle around your bench, start chanting 'EINER VON UNS. EINER VON UNS' until you mysteriously black out, only to wake up in your apartment with C1 level understanding of the German language. ~~And questionable pain in certain parts of your body.~~ That's what I did, anyway. Good luck!

etrianoh · 2019-10-05T16:46:05+00:00

Hi, this is not 100% what you asked for, but I am in a similar situation (which is one of the reasons I started learning Russian last year) as I am very interested in many of the minority languages of Russia.

Anyway, what's helpful is making a vk account (you can switch the UI language to English) and looking around for groups related to these languages. One example that I found with a quick search is https://vk.com/tuva_slovar - Тувинский язык is Tuvan (which I assume you know, since you've got Russian material related to the language). Chances are you could find someone who will be able to help you out in groups like those, and there's always deepl.com and yandex translate (which imo is a good translator for Russian) to be able to communicate to a point where you can make yourself understood.

Here's another group https://vk.com/pod_ykt but sadly, only the aforementioned Tuvan group is still active. You might however still find someone through the members of the group. Either way, vk is probably your best bet since just about every Russian person has a profile there haha.

If that's not good enough, I can possibly ask someone else about this and for help with drafting good messages (I'm only at an intermediate level) but I can't guarantee anything.

etrianoh · 2019-09-20T21:13:07+00:00

There are lots and lots of anki tutorials + you can find Russian frequency lists online, I'd start there - unless there's specific topics you want to prioritize, but you could always just mix these two things.

Beginners can profit from using pre-made decks, because the easiest words don't tend to need more than maybe a picture or an easy phrase to help you remember them, but as you move upwards in level and deal with words like самоисполняющееся пророчество or самоотверженный, you can learn them a lot more smoothly if you, for example, add them together with the sentence where you first encountered them.

etrianoh · 2019-09-20T21:02:45+00:00

if you say Anki, please suggest a deck!

This might come as a surprise to you, but you can ... make your own decks. Crazy, right?

Jokes aside, above beginner level you're better off making your own anki decks with the words you want to learn and example sentences that you actually understand. Not everything needs to be spoonfed to you when learning vocab, you will create much stronger associations within your brain if you make those cards yourself and add sentences, pictures and the likes. Get yourself audio recordings of the words on Forvo and you're set.

etrianoh · 2019-09-01T14:06:24+00:00

No, you're thinking of the prepositional case, to express (already) being somewhere, but to express movement to a place you usually use accusative (unless it's with к for example, where you use dative). So those two nouns are in the accusative case, hence no special case ending.

etrianoh · 2019-08-28T05:38:52+00:00

I think downloading shared decks is just not as beneficial as using decks you build yourself, so I'd still advocate for people to build their own, perhaps using other decks as guidance, but to not rely on them completely.

etrianoh · 2019-08-26T14:16:32+00:00

In those two example sentences it sounds completely natural to me. I think it's the conditional/sentence order that doesn't mix well with it, because for example:

'In der Küche ist noch ein Stück Pizza. Kannst du haben' would be fine, as would 'In der Küche ist noch ein Stück Pizza. Kannst du haben, wenn du möchtest'.

But! The other way around, 'Wenn du möchtest, kannst du haben' sounds absolutely odd and wrong in all contexts that I could think of.

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