Languages

I picked up the “World Citizen” edition of Pimsleur’s Dutch. Two lessons in and I sound like I’m from bloody Liverpool. Quite how that happened I don’t know…

Well I’m now on unit 3 of German II (i.e. the 33rd lesson in total) and it’s definitely moved up a gear. It has finally mentioned “du” the informal version of you (which even if you never say it you certainly need to recognise) and nearly every thing you say has “interesting” grammar as well as new vocabulary

(By interesting I mean things like subordinate clauses and modal verbs which play with word order).

And of course I have to sing praise to Pimsleur again… which of course I always do since it really is amazing. :)

Windows Media Player will only play .m3u playlists two levels deep…

You can include a playlist inside another playlist and it copes fine. If you include a playlists inside a playlist inside a playlist, the innermost one doesn’t get played.

Why do I tell you this? I decided to try and create a Pimsleur-style CD for Finnish. But to save on effort and increase modularity everything is done in bits and joined together with .m3u files. Since Windows Media Player can’t cope with the nesting though, I had to write a PHP to dump them all in one file (I’m expecting to hit a limit on the amount of songs in a playlist soon).

By the way a .m3u (playlist) is really complicated… it’s a list of URLs separated by newlines…

Pimsleur really does rule. After trying the first lesson of Russian, a language I have no previous experience in, I can confidently say Pimsleur is great. If you want to learn another language find out if your local library has the Pimsleur course in it first.

Actually I think Pimsleur should make the first lesson of all the courses freely available on their website or something. I really think that people are skeptical about how useful they could be and a lot would be convinced after trying them.

On a rather insignificant note, I think Russian is easier to pronounce in general than German.

Unfortunately Pimsleur don’t do Finnish so I’m having to learn it manually. I have a couple of Finnish course books but the bulk of my effort at the moment is aimed at learning vocabulary. According to the flashcard software I have I know 700 Finnish terms (mainly words but a few short phrases as well). I’m hoping to get to 5000 by New Year (an average of 30 a day).

I’m now officially one ninth of my way through the Pimsleur German course (that is I’ve finished Unit 10 of German I - Beginner). It’s still as good as I said previously. Although I think perhaps they should rename “How to be annoying in German”. Towards the end of unit 10, you have a conversation with a woman about having a meal.

“She will suggest a series of times to you. Refuse each time in turn and suggest an hour later.”

Another funny thing I noticed looking at the covers for the rest of the course, the three levels are “Beginner”, “Intermediate” but not “Advanced”. The third level is “Intermediate Plus”. Subtle way of saying even if you complete the course you have a way to go yet.

Least favourite German fragment so far: “jetzt nichts”.

I made an interesting loan from my local library a couple of days ago; Pimsleur Complete German I. It’s a lot better than I expected. Whether it really is as good as it seems I can’t really judge since I haven’t really got to any material that is completely new to me.

The progress feels fairly slow but to be honest it isn’t any slower than most book-based courses should be since it forces you to do the exercises you might normally just gloss over.

For anybody considering learning a language I strongly suggest trying to find a copy of the Pimsleur course for it (i.e. not buy if you can avoid; they’re expensive).

Just to prove I’m not the only one who likes this, check these comments from someone learning Spanish.

(Unfortunately they don’t do Finnish by the way.)

This page lists the 2253 forms of the word “kauppa”, Finnish for “shop”. Finnish is highly agglutinative so having a lot of forms for each word is expected . But this is rather more than most people would predict I think. It isn’t as bad as you think since Finnish suffixes embody concepts most languages use several words for. i.e. Finnish uses longer words in most sentences but there are fewer of them.

This is cleverly embodied in the quote from this site: “Why lose time and energy saying ’the committee that takes care of negotiations concerning the truce’ when you can use a simple little word like ‘aseleponeuvottelutoimikunta?’”

Have a look at:

http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/vocab/reading/en-fi-1.xml.

You will need a fairly new browser to see this properly.

Whether I can be bothered to make a whole website out of this, mirroring (and possible helping) my own attempt to learn Finnish, who knows…