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Post by lillielangtry on Dec 13, 2021 15:35:09 GMT -5
Well, today we learned how to form the present tense. And now I understand why we started with the simple past!
Seriously, it's not that bad, but it's going to require considerably more concentration and rote learning than the past, which is all regular.
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 14, 2021 12:01:23 GMT -5
Wow, everything is irregular and not just certain verbs like in French etc?
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Post by lillielangtry on Dec 14, 2021 12:43:52 GMT -5
No, it's a bit different to that.
You have to learn a separate "present stem" for each verb that then gets the relevant endings. Apparently there's no real pattern or way of deducing the stem from the infinitive. So, for example, the verb "to see" is "didan", but the present stem is "bin", making "I see" "man mibinam". I would not exactly guess that "mibinam" belonged to "didan" in any way at all...
But, I'm sure the initial answer is just to learn the most common verbs by heart. And, as Farsi uses a lot of compound verbs made of joining a noun plus a common verb, that will probably get us a long way.
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 14, 2021 17:13:20 GMT -5
Wow! That's super interesting... I'd love to be able to be able to know how forms like that evolved.
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 16, 2021 20:44:17 GMT -5
Duolingo wanted me to say "the spring" in German, so remembering my Wagner I used "der Lenz," but Duo marked it wrong.
So I popped "der Lenz" into Google Translate because I swear that's what Sieglinde says, and it gave the main translation as "the bilge," which of course made me laugh, at the thought of someone in an opera passionately singing "you are the bilge!"
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Post by lillielangtry on Dec 17, 2021 1:56:26 GMT -5
huh, Lenz is a very common surname, I'd honestly never thought of it having a meaning beyond that! But dict.cc does have it as a poetic word for spring (der Frühling was the word Duolingo will have been wanting, as you've probably found out by now).
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Post by Liiisa on Dec 17, 2021 6:16:40 GMT -5
Ja, der Frühling! But I remembered the line from the aria correctly, in fact the name of it is "Du Bist der Lenz."
I also just looked up Lenz in my German dictionary to see if there was anything else interesting in there and happened to notice that "lenzen" means "to pump out," so I guess that's where the "bilge" comes in.
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Post by rikita on Dec 18, 2021 16:19:12 GMT -5
yeah, lenz is an old or poetic word for spring, you wouldn't use it in normal conversation these days, but i guess anyone who read older poems in school would understand it ...
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Post by rikita on Dec 18, 2021 16:20:45 GMT -5
a. now added greek to the list of languages she wants to learn, because there is a greek song she likes (the annoying thing is with these songs that are popular in translated versions, that it is quite difficult to find the original version on youtube - i'd like to play it to her in greek, but if i search for it, i find either lots of choirs singing it in german, or all kinds of other songs, not the one i am looking for ...
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Post by vinnyd on Dec 18, 2021 17:22:21 GMT -5
"Der Lenz" reminds some of us of Wagner and others of this:
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Post by vinnyd on Dec 18, 2021 17:28:10 GMT -5
What song, rikita?
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Post by rikita on Dec 18, 2021 18:05:47 GMT -5
it's called "to chimona" - this is the german version:
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Post by vinnyd on Dec 18, 2021 19:27:19 GMT -5
Rikita, is this it?
(I can't see your video.)
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Post by rikita on Dec 18, 2021 19:31:17 GMT -5
no, that is a different melody - it seems there are a lot of songs iwth to chimona in their title ...
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Post by vinnyd on Dec 18, 2021 19:38:20 GMT -5
No, I have found the German version and that is definitely not it. To χειμώνα = winter; my song is "I don't like winter" and the German song is about winter. I can't find a Greek version.
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Post by riverhorse on Dec 19, 2021 9:02:48 GMT -5
I had a bit of a giggle earlier this week when a colleague of mine showed me a writing piece from one of her Year 10 non-native classes, writing about Christmas traditions.
He wrote "We decorate our Christmas tree with gold limes". The German word for tinsel is Lametta. The German word for lime is Limette. Oh how we laughed!
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Post by rikita on Dec 19, 2021 12:15:50 GMT -5
i can picture that tree ... gold limes might look better than gold tinsel ...
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Post by rikita on Dec 19, 2021 12:17:05 GMT -5
anyway, früher war mehr lametta ...
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Post by riverhorse on Dec 19, 2021 17:39:09 GMT -5
Ha ha! I adore Loriot !
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Post by ozziegiraffe on Dec 20, 2021 3:38:09 GMT -5
i can picture that tree ... gold limes might look better than gold tinsel ... I was thinking the same.
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Post by lillielangtry on Dec 20, 2021 15:36:29 GMT -5
Just had my last Farsi class of the year and of this beginners' course. We are hoping to continue in February, depending on Covid restrictions and needing to find a new, suitable room. I will actually really miss it.
Oddly, we still haven't done the whole alphabet - although I have more or less learnt it myself. But we have covered quite a bit of grammer: conjugation of the simple past and present tenses, forming negatives, the dative and accusative, possessives.
Now to keep practicing so I don't just forget it all by February.
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Post by snowwhite on Jan 4, 2022 7:32:10 GMT -5
We'll see how long this lasts, but I was finding the Duo French course really boring (I was being reminded of things, and learning the odd new word, but mostly just answering questions I knew the answers to), so I thought I'd try something actually NEW to me and started with Danish yesterday, which is actually quite fun and a very different experience, even though I suspect my listening and speaking skills will need a LOT of work.
I'm having to guess what new words mean (mostly successfully so far) and work out that articles and plurals are mostly done with suffixes etc. Apparently far better for the brain to learn something actually new.
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Post by riverhorse on Jan 4, 2022 9:22:18 GMT -5
Ha ha, less than 24 hours since arriving in the North and already the locals' nasally accent has rubbed off on me. I swear it's not deliberate, just osmosis but it's driving PG nuts!
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Post by sprite on Jan 4, 2022 17:59:29 GMT -5
I learned, from an Arabic speaker whose sister-in-law is Iranian, that Persians and Arabic speakers can read each other's writing, but not understand when speaking it--bit like Mandarin and Cantonese?
My language skills are absolute toilet right now.
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Post by vinnyd on Jan 4, 2022 18:53:43 GMT -5
I learned, from an Arabic speaker whose sister-in-law is Iranian, that Persians and Arabic speakers can read each other's writing, but not understand when speaking it--bit like Mandarin and Cantonese? My language skills are absolute toilet right now. More like English and French. Same alphabet and some loan words form the other language in each language (probably not as many as English and French share), that's all. Each can read the other's writing in the sense that they can pronounce it (imperfectly) but they won't understand it except for a word here and there.
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Post by tzarine on Jan 4, 2022 19:30:14 GMT -5
I learned, from an Arabic speaker whose sister-in-law is Iranian, that Persians and Arabic speakers can read each other's writing, but not understand when speaking it--bit like Mandarin and Cantonese? My language skills are absolute toilet right now. More like English and French. Same alphabet and some loan words form the other language in each language (probably not as many as English and French share), that's all. Each can read the other's writing in the sense that they can pronounce it (imperfectly) but they won't understand it except for a word here and there. there are some cantonese phrases that are never written. i used to ask all the time when i first lived in hong kong diaspora chinese usually read traditional chinese pinyin in a ccp invention to increase literacy
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Post by scicaro on Jan 5, 2022 1:19:45 GMT -5
We'll see how long this lasts, but I was finding the Duo French course really boring (I was being reminded of things, and learning the odd new word, but mostly just answering questions I knew the answers to), so I thought I'd try something actually NEW to me and started with Danish yesterday, which is actually quite fun and a very different experience, even though I suspect my listening and speaking skills will need a LOT of work. I'm having to guess what new words mean (mostly successfully so far) and work out that articles and plurals are mostly done with suffixes etc. Apparently far better for the brain to learn something actually new. Let me know if you want some help.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jan 5, 2022 1:29:23 GMT -5
Yes, vinny is right. Apparently it's the Arabic influence that means Farsi has four different letters for the sound "s", and you just have to learn for each word which one it is - so thanks for that, Arabic! ;-)
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Post by vinnyd on Jan 5, 2022 6:36:03 GMT -5
Arabic only has two s's: س and ص (different pronunciations: the first one is like the English s).
I am trying to work out what the other two would be. Probably
ث
which in Arabic is the th in thin. Is the last one
ذ
which is the th in then (which I would expect to be a z sound in Farsi) or
ش
which is sh?
My guess is that the ones other than س only occur in loan words from Arabic.
You should thank the Arabs, though. You might have to be learning cuneiform.
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Post by lillielangtry on Jan 5, 2022 8:02:23 GMT -5
No, you're right, I guess it is only 3 - se, sin and sad ث س ص
ز is like a soft z and ش is a sh
My teacher was probably including the z one when he said 4, because most of his students are German native speakers.
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