Rosetta Stone is addictive
May. 26th, 2008 10:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
maeve66Thank you, thank you everyone who gave me this marvelous birthday present. I need to write thank you notes, but I warn you all that I am crap at that. I'll aim for it. But if I fail, please know how grateful and overjoyed I am to have this piece of software!
I can now see why TM, my Hong Kong born student, so loved to celebrate himself when he got scores of 90% on lessons. He would make the championship gesture, clasping his hands over his head and shaking them, or lift his laptop to show everyone the screen. Everyone else who was working on some other lesson or (supposedly) paying attention to direct instruction, and not needing to remark on his Rosetta Stone scores. You have to get at least 85% (mastery) to be allowed to proceed further, to the next lesson. Me, having started the program... I am sad if I miss any answer at all. 100%, man, that's my goal. But I understand T. better, now.
Anyway, here's what I can write, now, having completed four lessons of Hindi from Rosetta Stone. Of course, the final sentence is really only possibly because of help from S., in Mumbai, via instant message tutoring. I couldn't possibly have either structured it or known the vocabulary, except from my various phrasebooks and dictionaries. Which are misleading. In the original thing I wrote, I asked rhetorically if what I'd written was "tasty", instead of "interesting".
मैं थोड़ा थोड़ा हिन्दी लिख सकती हूँ। मेरा सफ़ेद बिल्ली रिलक बुरी है। मेरा जवान बिल्ली मया काली है।
गज़ब, है ना?
भाषा शिक्षा में बिल्लिया कयूँ हमेशा आ जाते है?
Also, please remember that this little script thing cannot do conjuncts, damn it. So billee isn't spelled right, and I am sure other words suffer, too. Still, here is more or less what it is supposed to say:
--------
Mehn thoda thoda Hindi likh sakti hoon. Mere safed billee Rilke buri hai. Mere javan billee Maya kali hai.
Gazab, hai na? (not sure how to transliterate that)
Bhasa shiksha mein billiya kyun hamesha aa jate hai?
--------
Or:
--------
I can write a little little bit of Hindi. My white cat Rilke is old. My young cat Maya is black.
Interesting, huh?
Why do language lessons always involve cats? (Why do cats always come into language lessons?)
-------
See, the LAST time I tried to learn a language on my own -- Gaelic, which I think I wrote about a few weeks ago ... that is, I mentioned it a few weeks ago... I tried learning it from "Teach Yourself Irish", the book and CASSETTE TAPES, twenty YEARS ago. Anyway, the only sentence I remember from it was: An kaht ban an chairde something something. Which was more or less: the white cat sits by the fire. So what gives with the cats?
As of yesterday, I can now tell you about a boy running, falling, jumping, reading, swimming, walking (going), being on something, being under something, and being in something. Similarly, I can tell you about a girl doing those things, a man doing those things and a woman doing those things. I can also tell you that the old woman has white hair, while the girl has black hair. And the man has a buzz cut (admi ki baal chota chota hai). Ladki dhor rahi hai. (The girl is running). And so on. Aurat ki baal lambe hai. (The woman has long hair). I can identify cats, dogs, elephants, airplanes, fish, birds, cars, homes, (old and new), horses, and the colors yellow, white, black, red, blue, and pink, for some reason. Not green. Not purple. I would think that Hindi would be a language saturated with colors, but I am wondering whether people just use comparatives, instead -- like saying something is "eggplant colored" or "hibiscus colored" or "sunset colored".
Oh... by the way, Mac users -- I had to switch browsers to Safari, which is not as pretty or functional in my eyes as Firefox... but it can render Hindi, so what can I do? Sigh. I tried downloading unicode fonts for the Mozilla Firefox browser, but none of my ignorant efforts worked. If I had a computer guru locally, I would ask for help. But I don't think I do.
I can now see why TM, my Hong Kong born student, so loved to celebrate himself when he got scores of 90% on lessons. He would make the championship gesture, clasping his hands over his head and shaking them, or lift his laptop to show everyone the screen. Everyone else who was working on some other lesson or (supposedly) paying attention to direct instruction, and not needing to remark on his Rosetta Stone scores. You have to get at least 85% (mastery) to be allowed to proceed further, to the next lesson. Me, having started the program... I am sad if I miss any answer at all. 100%, man, that's my goal. But I understand T. better, now.
Anyway, here's what I can write, now, having completed four lessons of Hindi from Rosetta Stone. Of course, the final sentence is really only possibly because of help from S., in Mumbai, via instant message tutoring. I couldn't possibly have either structured it or known the vocabulary, except from my various phrasebooks and dictionaries. Which are misleading. In the original thing I wrote, I asked rhetorically if what I'd written was "tasty", instead of "interesting".
मैं थोड़ा थोड़ा हिन्दी लिख सकती हूँ। मेरा सफ़ेद बिल्ली रिलक बुरी है। मेरा जवान बिल्ली मया काली है।
गज़ब, है ना?
भाषा शिक्षा में बिल्लिया कयूँ हमेशा आ जाते है?
Also, please remember that this little script thing cannot do conjuncts, damn it. So billee isn't spelled right, and I am sure other words suffer, too. Still, here is more or less what it is supposed to say:
--------
Mehn thoda thoda Hindi likh sakti hoon. Mere safed billee Rilke buri hai. Mere javan billee Maya kali hai.
Gazab, hai na? (not sure how to transliterate that)
Bhasa shiksha mein billiya kyun hamesha aa jate hai?
--------
Or:
--------
I can write a little little bit of Hindi. My white cat Rilke is old. My young cat Maya is black.
Interesting, huh?
Why do language lessons always involve cats? (Why do cats always come into language lessons?)
-------
See, the LAST time I tried to learn a language on my own -- Gaelic, which I think I wrote about a few weeks ago ... that is, I mentioned it a few weeks ago... I tried learning it from "Teach Yourself Irish", the book and CASSETTE TAPES, twenty YEARS ago. Anyway, the only sentence I remember from it was: An kaht ban an chairde something something. Which was more or less: the white cat sits by the fire. So what gives with the cats?
As of yesterday, I can now tell you about a boy running, falling, jumping, reading, swimming, walking (going), being on something, being under something, and being in something. Similarly, I can tell you about a girl doing those things, a man doing those things and a woman doing those things. I can also tell you that the old woman has white hair, while the girl has black hair. And the man has a buzz cut (admi ki baal chota chota hai). Ladki dhor rahi hai. (The girl is running). And so on. Aurat ki baal lambe hai. (The woman has long hair). I can identify cats, dogs, elephants, airplanes, fish, birds, cars, homes, (old and new), horses, and the colors yellow, white, black, red, blue, and pink, for some reason. Not green. Not purple. I would think that Hindi would be a language saturated with colors, but I am wondering whether people just use comparatives, instead -- like saying something is "eggplant colored" or "hibiscus colored" or "sunset colored".
Oh... by the way, Mac users -- I had to switch browsers to Safari, which is not as pretty or functional in my eyes as Firefox... but it can render Hindi, so what can I do? Sigh. I tried downloading unicode fonts for the Mozilla Firefox browser, but none of my ignorant efforts worked. If I had a computer guru locally, I would ask for help. But I don't think I do.
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no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 02:40 am (UTC)By the way, the way you do conjuncts with the Devanagari-QWERTY input scheme is by typing an F (lower case; sorry, I told you the wrong thing earlier) after the first consonant, then the second consonant. So to do ल्ल you'd type l-f-l. (Capital F is how you get the dot under the preceding character.)
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 03:00 am (UTC)क्षत्रिया Something like that? Also,
हिन्दी
बिल्ली
प्रीय That's "dear", yes? Oh, so exciting, and satisfying. Thanks, J!
no subject
Date: 2008-05-27 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-28 06:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-05-28 06:26 am (UTC)