My multilingual recording in 11 languages

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Hello everyone. After a lot of consideration, I have decided to give it a shot and record myself trying to speak in the languages that I have learned. I was a bit afraid to do so, because while in general and in my experience people find polyglottery interesting, to some it might seem that people who do similar recordings or videos are show offs and attention seekers, which really wasn't my intention. I only wanted to join the community of people who have done so before and babble along in the languages that I speak for anyone who'd be interested in listening to my specific language combinations. I was hesitating for a long time and only until there were dozens of people out there with similar blogs, recordings or videos, I decided to give it a shot myself. This way I didn't feel like I was standing out too much and felt like just one of many.

Another reason for doing the recording was, that on my blog I post articles mostly about languages and language learning and doing a recording of this sort seemed like a nice way to let readers decide, whether my articles would be interesting for them to read. I wouldn't be very honest if I'd say that I didn't do the recording to gain some sort recognition, or try to compare myself to others, but I really didn't do it to show off.

My language history

I was born in Kosice in South-east Slovakia, which at the time was Czechoslovakia. As our city is only 20 km away from the Hungarian border, a lot of people living in our city speak Hungarian to some extent and my mother, even though I was of completely Slovak origin, decided to put me into a Hungarian kindergarten to learn the language which I acquired as a secondary native one. Living in Czechoslovakia, we were constantly exposed to the Czech language as well, so by luck or chance, I grew up with three native languages (even though I didn't use Czech actively until I was a student in Prague in 2007). I continued my studies at a Slovak elementary and later a secondary grammar school. At the age of eight I went to USA and at the age of 12 to Austria, learning both German and English almost to a native level of a 15 year old American or Austrian/German kid, which are both levels that I have sadly lost now.  

台灣的藝人

就算是我來台灣不到一年半, 平常我對八卦沒有特別的興趣, 但因為我們早餐店與午餐店的桌子上都放著 «蘋果日報», 而且為了提高我的聽力我每天都看台灣電視,而無法視而不見台灣的藝人. 不知道親愛的讀者會不會覺得這篇文章有一點無聊, 畢竟只是我對一些台灣藝人的看法而已, 但也有可能親愛的讀者會提供我一些意見.  

周杰倫

周杰倫是我第一個知道的台灣藝人. 我還沒有來台灣在剛剛開始學中文的時候在網路上找中文的歌, 有人建議聽周杰倫. 有一些他的歌我真的喜歡, 而且我覺得他很有天分. 他會很厲害地彈鋼琴, 電影演的也不錯, 他所做的音樂常常有一個idea, 他感覺不只是做音樂為了賺錢. 但是我也覺得他非常喜歡愛現, 而我們西方人覺得, 一個成人應該不要那麼喜歡愛現因為那個比較算是小朋友的行為. 然後他說話的時候我常常聽不懂他在說什麼.

狐假虎威

This following text is from the book called 戰國策/楚 – Strategies of the Warring states, Chu state chapter. It is again a simple story with a message related to real historical events. It is a little bit longer than the previous one, but the vocabulary and sentence structure is straightforward and easy to understand.

Text:

狐假虎威

虎求百獸而食之。得狐。狐曰。子無敢食我也。天帝使我長百獸。今子食我。是逆天帝命也。子以我為不信。吾為子先行。子隨我後。觀百獸之見我而敢不走乎。虎以為然。故遂與之行。獸見之皆走。虎不知獸畏己而走也。以為畏狐也。

Learning Cantonese - part II.

I first started listening to Cantonese advanced podcasts, because I thought that since I wanted to listen to the sound of the language and get used to its flow first, any spoken Cantonese would do. It turned out that the knowledge of Mandarin and Classical Chinese would be way too helpful in order to just learn Cantonese as a completely new language and so I switched to newbie and elementary lessons, where I could get into some structure as well. 

I did not try to find out how many tones there were in Cantonese or what their description was. It was really relaxing to say the least. No stress from trying to reproduce the tonal curve I saw in the book, no stress from trying to “mimic a picture”, no stress from trying to reproduce the correct sound pitch and so on. I also didn't have to subconsciously solve problems like: Is the tone high enough? Doesn't it sound strange when I say it like this? How many tones are below this tone I just said? Is this tone different enough from that other tone starting at the same pitch? So many questions every student has to face just trying to produce a simple “Hello” in Cantonese, when he or she learns the tones through descriptions. Now what I mean by feeling no stress is that of course no one is expecting me to get the pronunciation right the first time and naturally I will do mistakes, but the point I'm trying to make is that this way I have much less stress when it comes to the number of things I have to worry about while trying to say one or two simple words. The main difference is that I am concentrating only on the sound. 

Studying Mandarin - part III.

What I think helped me, when it comes to learning Mandarin:

Speaking:

Moving to Taiwan, spending as much time with Taiwanese as possible, memorizing everything I found useful exactly the way Taiwanese said it, asking them to correct my pronunciation whenever possible. I wasn't writing down words or constructions that I found useful. The number of expressions was just too big and so I figured, if the expression would be important for me at the time, it would stick in my brain, if not it'll stick there once it becomes important. As far as pronunciation goes, this is one thing I kept and keep trying to work on almost every day as there are sounds that I still don't get right (j-,zh-,sh-,ch-,ri,-a,-i,b,p,) 

Pronunciation of Mandarin is a big issue really. It’s not only that producing the correct sounds takes a lot of practice, but recalling the correct sounds and recognizing them in fluent speech effortlessly takes a lot of time and is very tiring.

Studying Mandarin - part II.

One of the few things that I am sure of until now, when it comes to learning Chinese is that you should not memorize characters before you've learned how to use the relevant word confidently in real life speech (in other words learn the word without knowing how to write it) and definitely not learn 10000+ characters like a maniac through an SRS system in the beginner/intermediate stage. (Actually even later. I found out that even though I could recall a relatively large amount of words, in real life speech it was very very tiring to use them because I had to recall the correct syllable and tone 3-4 times in every sentence which was devastating and the words didn’t “stick” as well as some of the other words that I learned in natural conversation without the SRS stress). In my opinion it is a complete loss of time and energy. My reasons are that character images are being stored in a completely different part of the brain, there is too much interference between the characters themselves and you will just become overwhelmed with the information as a beginner. Some might argue that this way one can remember the word much better but in my case whenever I thought of a word I had first the character pop up in my mind and not the sound which is insane time loss in real time speech. At the beginning of my learning process I used to color characters in 4 colors according to their tones which is good aid in remembering which tone the syllable actually has but not an aid in remembering the sound itself, which is again terrible time loss and interference, as the sound is much more important than the image. I realized that whenever I wanted to say a word I had the color pop up instead of hearing the correct sound with the correct tone in my head. I realized this way too late and lost too much time, energy and nerves. Goes without saying that the tones should not be learned in isolation and instead should be understood as a permanent component of a syllable and the same syllables in different tones should be considered as completely different sound units and not grouped and learned together. 

Learning Cantonese - part I.

As every good language lover I also have a wish list of languages that I would love to speak one day but sadly as life is short most of these wishes only remain wishes. Cantonese was also one of those languages I wanted to study for a long time but since I had no friends from Hong Kong (or the area) or plans to live there any time soon, it remained only a wish for a possible future date. Last year in November I visited Hong Kong for 10 days and I had so much fun there and the Cantonese language sounded so good that I decided that I really wanted to study the language the first chance I get.

I personally don’t think it is a very good idea to study more than one language at the same time and I also don’t think it is a good idea to try and learn as many languages as one can in the shortest possible time, because in my opinion language learning should not be viewed upon as a sport or a competition so as I study Farsi at the moment, to study a little bit of Cantonese as well would be against my own philosophy. But then again I also think that interest and motivation are extremely important so a bit of Cantonese can do no harm. I only decided to dab a little with the sound system of the language anyway. The only resource that I am using right now is the new cantoneseclass101 podcast. There are currently not that many newbie and beginner lessons available, but it will do fine for now.

Jazz fusion

Back in 1996 my guitar teacher gave me a tape recording of the 1982 Friday night in San Francisco concert by Paco de Lucia, John McLaughlin and Al Di Meola. I knew little about guitar music and was very lucky to be introduced to these three composers so early on. They had a great impact on me as a music listener and occasional player. Although I am far from being a professional, guitar playing and improvisation alone or in duets is a great source of joy for me. After being introduced to these composers I listened to a lot of works from all three of them and gradually got to know more and more music outside of my traditional musical library, which back then consisted mostly of hip hop (which is not a bad thing either).

Since there is a great number of jazz fusion artists and since some of the readers maybe have never listened to Jazz fusion, I will try to introduce some of the players that I have been listening to over the years and the kind reader has to rely on my musical taste which he/she of course may or may not like. I am not an expert on jazz fusion or music in general, but I do like to listen to beautiful musical melodies and nice harmonies that have deeper ideas and I hope that some readers who don't know jazz fusion or have never heard of Al Di Meola, Paco de Lucia or John McLaughlin might come to love their music just as I did.

Language learning resources

Chinese (Cantonese):

Voice of America Cantonese service podcast. Two hour daily news service.:

http://www.voacantonese.com/podcast/?count=20&zoneId=2067

A nice podcast to learn Cantonese:
http://www.cantoneseclass101.com/wp/wp-feed-audio-video.php

Chinese (Mandarin):

NHK Japan Mandarin News service podcast, updated several times per day. Very professional: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/chinese.xml

Chinesepod.com podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/chinesepod/TfVV

Radio Taiwan international. News podcast, uptated 2-3 times a week:
http://mediafile.rti.org.tw:8080/podcast/PodCasting/rti_taiwanview.aspx

Australian SBS radio Mandarin service podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/radiomandarin

United nations radio Mandarin Chinese news podcast.:
http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/chinese/index.php?feed=itunes

Voice of America Chinese service podcast. Two hour daily news service.:
http://www.voachinese.com/podcast/?count=20&zoneId=2966

Thesaurus linguae sericae
A huge on-line archive of Classical Chinese texts, Classical Chinese text analyses, translations, Classical Chinese dictionary, thesaurus ect.

Chinese text project
Another huge database of Classical Chinese texts with a possibility to search in multiple Chinese dictionaries (說文解字, 康熙字典, 爾雅, 廣韻 ect.)

Chinese etymology
Oracle bone script, Bronze inscriptions, Seal script database.

Czech:

Czech national radio podcast:

Website:

http://hledani.rozhlas.cz/iradio/?defaultNavigation=+generic2:^%22%C4%8CRo+1+-+Radio%C5%BEurn%C3%A1l%22$

Podcast link:

http://www2.rozhlas.cz/podcast/cro1.rss

Dutch:

Dutch news podcast. Daily news in Dutch.:
http://download.omroep.nl/rnw/smac/podcast/xml/nl_nieuwslijn.xml

 

French:

Radio l'Europe 1 News podcast, updated daily:
http://www.europe1.fr/podcasts/actu.xml

Very nice interviews on a vast variety of topics. Radio l'Europe podcast:
http://www.europe1.fr/podcasts/interview-8h20.xml

Farsi:

News in Persian from NHK Japan, updated several times per day. NHK Japan Persian news service podcast:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/persian.xml

Australian SBS radio Persian service podcast:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/persianfarsi

BBC Persian, one hour long newscast updated daily:

http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/worldservice/jjn/rss.xml

German:

ZDF news podcast, updated daily:
http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/podcast/222736?view=podcast

WDR podcast. Interviews usually concerning German, European and World politics:
http://podcast.wdr.de/radio/redezeit.xml

WDR podcast. A wonderful podcast about popular science:
http://podcast.wdr.de/radio/leonardo.xml

WDR podcast. Round table political talk shows:
http://podcast.wdr.de/radio/presseclubwdr5.xml

Hungarian:

Hungarian political talk show podcast, updated daily:
http://inforadio.hu/podcasting/arena/

SBS radio Australia Hungarian podcast, updated weekly:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/hungarian

Hungarian digital library
A large collection of free audiobooks.

Italian:

Podcast of La Repubblica, updated daily. Very good debates on a variety of topics:
http://tv.repubblica.it/xml/podcast.php

Il Sole 24 ore podcast. As much as I loved La Repubblica, this podcast beats it in terms or organization and quality. It is updated several times a day with shows that are up to 90 minutes long. Spoken word only, interviews on a large variety of topics - all in all a great podcast:
http://www.radio24.ilsole24ore.com/podcast/radio24.xml

Polish:

Very good political debates. Polish Radio 3 podcast:
http://www.polskieradio.pl/Podcast/6e8788c0-1d6e-4cce-b04b-765a80ac52e0

Portuguese:

News in Portuguese, updated daily. NHK Japan Portuguese news service podcast:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/portuguese.xml

Romanian:

SBS radio Australia Romanian podcast, updated weekly:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/romanian

Russian:

Russian news podcast, updated daily:
http://www.svobodanews.ru/podcast/?count=50&zoneId=205 

Podcast of Радио Эхо Москвы:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/echomsk

Slovak:

Slovak national radio:
Website:

http://www.rozhlas.sk/radio-slovensko/web-archiv?rel=379

Podcast (unfortunately discontinued for the moment):

http://www.rozhlas.sk/inetportal/web/podcast/index.php?id=425

Spanish:

News in Spanish, updated daily. NHK Japan Spanish service podcast:
http://www3.nhk.or.jp/rj/podcast/rss/spanish.xml

News in Spanish from the United nations. UN radio Spanish service podcast:
http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/spanish/rss/itunes.xml

For those who do not know what a podcast is or how to subscribe to them, here's a short video introduction.