Friday, May 3, 2013

Funny...

Immediately after I decided to join the 6 weeks' challenge, I stopped having anything to do with Maltese.

And I will be going to Finland for some 3-4 months in two weeks. :-D

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Update:

I have been studying for some 8 hours today.

I have been working with

- grammar
I really want to understand this thing with verbs. I'm starting to understand some of the difficulties Germanic language speakers  might have with Finnish. All these different verb forms! :-D
I still haven't quite got a grasp of the Maltese verbs, but I'm getting there.
It was also nice to finally understand għand. It's practically the same as the Finnish way of saying "I have..." or "I'm hungry, cold, tired, sad, angry..." -lla. It is even translated as a preposition in English (at, to).
- glosses
I like the word "gloss" better than "flashcards". Gloss, from Latin glossa, or Greek γλῶσσα, is a brief marginal notation of the meaning of a word or wording in a text, and the word used of the different methods of... well... flashcards. That's why I prefer it. It's hard to call a list of words or a book page "a flashcard".
Anyway, I have written all the basic words I want to know on pieces of paper (yes, flashcards :-D), and all the terms from the first chapter of Hell Lane (Sqaq L-Infern), from Learning With Texts. The problem with LWT is that it doesn't accept that one writes in the different verb forms as one word, which is what I would prefer. For it għandu, għandi and għandom are three different words, to me they are the same. Għand.
I wrote first all the terms as they are, but it is really stupid of me. I don't learn languages the parrot way. I want to understand. So I have been sorting my glosses and trying to find out which are verbs and which not... and that's not easy, because I really am an absolute beginner with Maltese. Sure, I know the alphabet and numbers and some general information about the language and recognize a couple of words from the radio channel I'm listening, but - frankly, I know nothing :-D
I have about 400 glosses, which I have divided into 100 gloss packs. The 400 gloss pack is way too big to handle and too intimidating :-D

- sentences
I have printed out some hundred pages of "tourist talk" and plan on writing them in my little notebook :-D
I have also written several example sentences with the different verb forms, to get a better grip of them.

I think that's pretty much what I will do tomorrow too.

I need to collect some 50 sentences from different sources and read them to my MP3-player so that I can take that with me, when I take my 5 km walk, and shadow. (Yes, I know. I hardly speak good Maltese, but it's what I have, and if I managed to learn French without hearing proper French, I think I can do the same with Maltese. After all, it's pronounced pretty much as it's written :-D It's only the ċ, ġ, għ, h, x and ż that are different from the Finnish counterparts, and then għi and għu, when "għ" - or ayin - becomes an a. (Finnish, not the English.)

It's kind of funny that AJATT has given up the 10.000 sentences project :-D Well... it's ok. I'll give it a change. I'm going to a place with no computers, so I need to find ways to learn language without computers... And there are so few good Maltese dictionaries... :-(

I need to translate the rest of chapter 2, and write the glosses from that. 

 

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