Showing posts with label vocabulary. Show all posts
Showing posts with label vocabulary. Show all posts

05 April 2011

Entry 9 - Tackling Another Language: Portuguese

I didn't expect to be absent for this long. I've been very busy. First of all, I have started learning Portuguese. Secondly, after knitting many lines, I've finally learned how to cast on stitches in addition to knitting or purling them. I've found a great site for knitting a tallit, and I've begun knitting it.

Portuguese: basic phrases...


Knitting: casting on...


- - -

Well, my weekend was nice. I walked the plaza and saw some unique people. For example, I saw a man - he had the most "pimped-out" bicycle that I've ever seen! I went to Kim Long's Asian Market and Pho KC in downtown Kansas City, and they had the best chicken soup. I also went to a BBQ restaurant in the City Market, which, in my opinion, is ten times better than Arthur Bryant's! Not only is their food a higher quality with a larger variety, but it is also accompanied by live, local music - in fact, almost every product and service of theirs is local! This BBQ and high-meat diet was joined by a large smoothie in the morning and a long hike during the afternoon. The lake was beautiful, I tell you... I definitely enjoyed my weekend.

On my hike, I saw a ball of loose cotton - oh, nope; my bad. I saw a newly dead pelican!


 I saw a strange car on the plaza....


And a man with a very interesting bike....


With our dead pelican's memorial....


And my father's hand... err, nevermind... let's not say anything here!


But, ah! Smell the flowers at the Kaufman memorial! What a lovely smell, a lovely sight!


With all the fun things happening, I've still had a rough week. Someone stole all of my papers - for every class! when I was using the restroom. I was barred from doing a lab in science class, and I barely finished an assignment in Geography. While it was fun, it took forever trying to scour the Internet for random residential addresses in Durban, South Africa. I know... it may not sound like a challenge, but I found no real-estate website that displayed an address in Kwa-Zulu Natal. I couldn't even run across random addresses when trying to find tutorials for addressing South African envelopes. It's funny, really... I told my teacher about this problem, and she said, "... many students including myself made it up." Ha - that was a relief! I hope this week is better.

This week is turning out better. My IED class (or, "Introduction to Engineering and Design") is using Skype in school for the very first time, I got a new Latin dictionary (two dictionaries!) for free, and I've improved my knitting. It's not so bad this week. I had fun.

I'm very thankful for what quality - and quantity - of events I had this preceding week. Thank you, Mighty One!


22 March 2011

Entry 7 - Editing Latin Wikipedia

I've contributed two articles to Vicipaedia: I created the "esraj" article, and I created the "gay literature" article. It's quite hard to translate English articles to Latin. I would use the Italian as a guide, but some of these articles are only available in English or Russian. Thus, my translations oft-times make no sense.

Using Vicipaedia and Wikipedia has made me wonder: what is the standard way of adopting foreign words? The phonology and gender is hard to logically determine.  Should the new word be masculine, feminine, or neuter? Should the word keep its spelling mostly unchanged, or should the sound be mimicked? If we should write the words as they sound, then how should we annotate the dzh sound in Latin orthography? If anyone knows anything about this, I'd like to hear your words!

Here are the articles I started:

http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litteratura_homophylophilia

http://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esraja

Ugh... I hope somebody corrects these: the grammar and spelling is horrible!

Entry 5 - Russian Words I Forget

There are a lot of words that I need to practice. This is going to take some work!
  1. РУКА
  2. ДЕЖАТЬ
  3. ПОДУМАЛ
  4. ГОСПОДИН
  5. ДЕСТИЯ
  6. БАРИНА
  7. КАВИЧКА
  8. ТИРЕ
  9. ИЗРАНИЛА
  10. ВСЕРОССИЙСКОМ
  11. ГОТОВ
  12. ТЕЛО
  13. РОХОЖ
  14. ИЗБИТОГО
  15. СЪЕХЗДА
  16. ДВОЙНИК
  17. ДО
  18. ПОЛУСМЕРТИ
  19. ЧЕЛОВЕК
  20. ВДРУГ
  21. ЗАПЛАКАЛА
On a positive note, I got to practice with a native speaker. Sadly, it was not vocal. Not that I could handle it. Man, I have learned something today: I need to start using chat rooms!