Berengaria’s Comments (group member since Nov 11, 2021)

Berengaria’s comments from the Language Learners and Polyglots group.

Elizabeth wrote: "I am hunting for quality picture books in either Hindi or Urdu that are available to order in the United States. Does anyone has a resource..."

Hi Elizabeth,
For Hindi, Pratham Books, Eklavya Books, and Katha publications are supposed to be great for children's titles.

Great indie bookstore in India link below. If you click on their Menu, there is a separate link for Hindi stories. Check out Tulika, Pratham, Katha, Ektara, and Eklavya. If you want comics, then check out Amar Chitra Katha. You can find good titles there and then check if Amazon.com or somewhere in the US is carrying them.

https://koolskoolbookstore.com/collec...

You can see flip books in Hindi here:
https://www.eklavya.in/books/flip-boo...

Jane wrote: "This is a personal 2024 challenge. I've just obtained two novels in German, both on ancient Rome, one originally by a Spanish author, but all I could find was a German translation--no English and I..."

Good luck on your challenge! I know the feeling. I've got a 500+ one in Italian to get through this year and a few 400 pagers. I am, and am not, looking forward to it! 😅

Sportyrod wrote: "Hi Berengaria,

Thanks for the the buddy read options. I’ve read Circe (loved it). I’m tempted by Mexican Gothic. I will keep an eye out for it at a second hand bookstore but don’t wait for me. I’m..."

I know someone else who would like to buddy read Mexican Gothic, but it will take her probs till Christmas to place a book order. If you can get your hands on a copy when she's ready to go, (Maybe January) then that will make a 3-person group buddy read!

Hi everybody! This has nothing to do with languages, but I just got my hands on a load of new books and am seeing if anybody would like to buddy read along.

Here's my list:

1. Bournville by Jonathan Coe
2. Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus
3. Local Gone Missing by Fiona Barton
4. Circe by Madeline Miller
5. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
6. Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid
7. Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead
8. 1984 by George Orwell

J.C. wrote: "no one has mentioned the Celtic languages yet"

Welsh I like the sound of, too.

When I speak it, though, I can always hear my American accent behind the words and that rather ruins it for me. (I don't have this problem with other langs)

Maybe it's because I feel that to speak good Welsh, I have to "put on an accent" first. That is, I have to fake a British-style accent with rotund vowels, half swallowed words and drawn out ends and THEN replace the English words with Welsh ones.

That's too much to juggle. But when I don't, I sound terrible to me!

Sportyrod wrote: " then Danish (eeww)"

😂 What's this eewwwwww? Does Danish sound like someone with a mental defect to you, as well? (You can say, we're all friends here...)

Chinese sounds shouty to me, too. I can tell Chinese from Japanese when I hear it, but I'm not so good at picking out Korean. It must not be very shouty as it's become quite popular to learn in the last few years.

As for school...we were offered Spanish, French, German and 2 years of Latin at my high school, which was A LOT for the 80s in the US. No Italian, though.

WHY to they let native speakers take their own language in school??!!! That's so...grrrrrrrr!😠

You know, I did a degree in German at university, and the other 2 people also doing a degree both had parents from Austria. They were doing German only because it was an super easy degree for them and they weren't shy about telling people that. They often emailed their essays home for their mothers (native speakers) to correct. I couldn't do that, as I come from a highly monoglot family.

The department got revenge in the end, though. For the degree, I was awarded an entire grade higher. I got a B, and they both got Cs. Angry as hornets, they were!

You know, I have the same impression of the US as you do of Australia. Almost nobody speaks a foreign language beyond a few fragments unless it's their heritage language. But I've met a few people online who claim that "everybody here in America speaks several languages! What are you talking about?"

When I ask them what they mean - the America I know is very monolingual - I find out that that person and virtually everybody they know is either 1st or 2nd generation or lives in an urban community that still speaks the heritage language. That would explain it then!😄

Peter wrote: "Are there languages that have a pleasant or unpleasant sound? Is this perception a question of individum or does it prevail in larger groups?"

Americans *heavily* stereotype languages. When I was in school, they would put kids into different languages based on those stereotypes. Here are the most common...

* French is very sexy and feminine, so it's a language for girls and beautiful women (men who speak it are clearly gay in some fashion).

*Italian is romantic and whimsical, therefore suitable for chefs and other expressive, emotional artistic people because it sounds like linguistic lasagna.

*Latin is for nerds who think too much and obsess over chess. They wear thick glasses and are socially awkward. They will always get better marks/grades than you do, even if they are terminally uncool and hide in closets.

*Spanish is spoken by dumb or poor people (or both) who live in dusty, hot climates (Mexico, yuck) and it sounds like an old, swayback donkey braying while lumbering clumsily down a hill.

*German is guttural, brutal and reminds you of the rat-tat-tat of a machine gun. Therefore it is a language only to be spoken...sorry BARKED...by men in the military.

Because I'm female and was not in the lowest classes, I was automatically slotted for French. It took me a good 20 minutes arguing with my advisor before he reluctantly switched me to German.

He said things like this: "German is hard. And it's guttural, so not very pretty. What's wrong with French? French is much prettier." (Get it? You're a girl, so learn French and leave German for the boys.)

This may have changed, idk. The view of Spanish certainly, although probably people still see it as an 'easy' language.

For most people who do not know or learn languages, I think it does have a lot to do with how your country/language views the speakers of that language and what history you have with them. Personal taste comes second.

I really like the sound of some languages others don't, like Danish. Most people I've spoken to (English speakers, of course) think it sounds like the speaker has a mental disability, Down's syndrome or something, and can't speak correctly.

I'm a big fan of German. It was my first foreign language and it is still my favorite. But the most beautiful language I've personally ever heard is Xhosa, which is a tribal language spoken mostly in South Africa. It's related to Zulu and has the clicking sounds. Really super. 😍

MeKenzie wrote: "I'm currently reading the Wipneus en Pim series (gaan op reis atm). I finished Wipneus en Pim en De Oude Parap..."

The book I really enjoyed was a collection of very short stories meant for adult learners called Het stoplicht: Verhalen in eenvoudig Nederlands It's about at an A2 level, so might be slightly over your head at the moment, but well worth the money.

It's been out for a while, so there might be other short books for learners on the market now. I don't know the titles, though!

You've got the exact right attitude, that's super! One step at a time and don't rush. Perfect!👍

As you probably know, people generally overestimate how much they can get done in a week and underestimate how much they can get done in a year. That's why I find setting year goals in languages always turns out to be the best policy. You can often surprise yourself! 😄

MeKenzie wrote: "Hi all, I'm a new member. I've already started my own challenge that happens to match this challenge here! "

Hi MeKenzie! It's true, isn't it? Reading really does improve your understanding of a language (grammar/new vocab) by leaps and bounds. And it's fun, too!

What type of books are you reading and how have you set up your challenge?

A few of us here read Dutch, so you're in good company! 😃

~G~ wrote: "Just finished my first book in Japanese:"

Wow! That's super. And with a book meant for adults, too. You have every reason in the world to pat yourself on the back! 👏

J.C. wrote: "I am in Croatia for a few days for a wedding, and have found that much of the Croatian I have been cramming is deserting me in speaking to people!"

Why do you think that is? Do you get the feeling they expect you to be fluent or are they subtly aggressive about foreigners?

Thanks guys!

Lea - no shame in quick reads! Many of my Swedish ones this year were rather short. Too bad it wasn't all so enjoyable, though.

Peter - Dante! Brave man. I've heard The Promise is really good, so I hope you enjoy listening to it. 😀

Rod - thanks, mate! I'm a zippy bunny this year. 🐇

Just finished my Foreign Language Reading Challenge 2023! (12 books not in English or German) Yay!

This last one was the first book of an Italian historical adventure series set in 1347. Challenging due to the historical vocab and faux medieval phrasing in some the dialogue, but I think I got about 90%, which is fine.

Only have one Petros Markaris mystery in French (translated from Greek) that I want to get to this year and that'll be pretty much it for me...unless I just HAVE TO read book 2 of the Italian adventure! (which might happen) 😎

Sportyrod wrote: "Interesting. I’ll give it a go. We are encouraged to use ChatGPT when we get stuck coding in my science studies."

The Uni of Southern Australia would be near you, wouldn't it?

Hi Everybody,

GR user Manny Rayer posted this:

"I've been experimenting with the idea of combining ChatGPT, DALL-E, the ReadSpeaker TTS engine and the LARA toolkit to create multimedia stories that can be used as reading material for people who want to improve their foreign language skills.

Here's an example. I simply gave the prompt "Write a short, quirky news story in Italian that could be used in an intermediate language class", and let Chat get on with it; when it had finished, I also asked it to add an English gloss for each word. I created a DALL-E image and converted into multimodal form using the LARA toolkit, the whole thing took about half an hour."


Here is a link to his review where you can find links to the different stories if you want to see how a computer would write language learning materials!

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...


I posted my thoughts to Manny and this was his reply...

"Thank you Berengaria, these are very encouraging comments! With ChatGPT-4's capable help (it's an excellent software engineer), I have in fact been putting together a server that will make it easy for people to create more stories of this kind. It lets you supply whatever prompt you like to create the initial text, also perform human post-editing to correct errors.

The results will be made publicly available on a dedicated site hosted by the University of South Australia. We plan to go live sometime in June/July 2023.

A Faroese-Icelandic linguistics student will soon be starting a summer project where she'll be using the server to experiment with creating texts at different levels of difficulty. Your suggestion that it would be more productive to focus on A2 rather than B2 makes good sense, I will pass that on to her! "


What are your opinions on this project? Sounds to me like any language learner will be able to generate their own learning texts on any subject they want through this server.

Peter wrote: "Berengaria wrote: "..
Your comment by itself Berengaria is a nice example of the difficulties translating fixed ex..."

My dictionary says "der Weg zur Hölle" or "Weg des geringsten Wiederstandes". I'd probably go for something like Irrweg.

Übersetzungen können uns leicht auf einen Irrweg führen, falls sie zu buchstäblich sind.
Translations can lead us down the primrose path if they are too literal.

But you are right - there is no connotation of a sweet-smelling path that leads somewhere dangerous in the German.

"Auf dem Holzweg sein" for me is more like "barking up the wrong tree".

Das glaubst du? Tja, bist auf dem Holzweg, mein Lieber.
You believe that? Well, you are barking up the wrong tree, mate.


My fave is "until the cows come home". From a GR friend I learned that a translator put that directly into German. "Du kannst ja warten bis die Kühe nach Hause kommen."

Naturally, most Germans will think of real cows and wonder why suddenly cows are there.

The best translation is however "bis St. Nimmerleinstag". Darauf kannst ja bis St Nimmerleinstag warten.

Lea wrote: "IMO, you can say "Nett, dich kennenzulernen." It's just that it does come from English and younger people say it more than older folks. "

I've normally been laughed at, but then I've mostly been around people 40+ which could explain it.

I've also met Germans who swear that tapping a glass with a fork to get people's attention at a party/gathering is NEVER done in Germany and is a completely foreign practice....and then you read German novels in which elderly German characters are doing just that! So, is it foreign influence or the fact that in some regions of Germany it wouldn't actually be done which makes it a bizarre thing for certain people?

Cool that you read Koch! I haven't got to De greppel, but have read Het diner and Zomerhuis med zwembad. Too bad it wasn't to your liking. I very much liked Het diner, but not Zomerhuis too much.

Peter wrote: "The discussion has gone silent for more than a week, so let me throw in a problem that I have with translation. ."

If I can compare, I can always tell if a German into English translation is good. The problem is - good translators must also be good writers.

A person with an excellent knowledge of two languages may not be able to do very good translating because they lack Creative Writing abilities. This is why the best translators have always been good or known writers in their own right.

Practical problems also arise when you *could* say something in the other language, but it doesn't really follow cultural rules. In how much do you change things that are possible?

Example:
Translating "Nice to meet you" as "Nett, dich kennen zu lernen" which MANY English -> German novels do. Germans don't say that normally, though. They say "Angenehm" (Pleasant) or "Freut mich" (I'm happy) or the equivalent in their region.

Early on, I thought - from reading English novels in German translation to improve my German - that you COULD say that in German. That it was normal in the two languages because it appeared so often in the novels.

But when I said that in real life, the German I was talking to always laughed and replied "Nice to meet you, too" in English. As if I was being terribly American, just translating English 1-to-1, and not really speaking German!

That's where you can be led down the primrose path by books in translation when they opt for *could be used* but not *usual*.

J.C. wrote: "Can I have a bit of fun with gobbledygook?
"I would of done better if I could of" !"

There is a reading test where they ask you to find all the letter f in a text. Most people won't circle the f in "of" because the brain registers it with the sound of "v", not f. I took that test...and yep, I missed out all the of-s, too!

So, if the brain registers ov and of the same... then "could've" and "could of" would be indistinguishable in the mind. We know that reading is based on sound, not on spelling, so that mix up is bound to happen!

The one with words I know is "card shark". Not right, it's "card sharp". Same thing happens with misheard song lyrics. Radio stations have a grand time with those.

CCR's "Bad Moon Rising" line of "there's a bad moon on the rise" is often misheard as "there's a bathroom on the right".

And REM's "Exhuming McCarthy" often is heard as "Excuse me, the car keys".

Bowl in a china shop really doesn't make any sense, does it?!

Ivy-Mabel wrote: "' The move away from grammar
has led to teachers and students speaking gobbledygook. "

I'm interested as to what you mean by "speaking gobbledygook" here, Ivy-Mabel, since teachers are also doing it! Can you give me an example of where the derailment is happening?