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Man divas gramātas
Despite all the distractions, I've still been learning Latvian--barely. Earlier this week, I began to hit the critical wait-they-really-expect-me-to-retain-the-vocabulary-in-the-lessons? point in my self study and moved on to other things. Then last night I got a surprise in the mail: Nuphy's classic copy of Teach Yourself Latvian.
This book has been a legend to me even among members of the Old School All Grammar All The Time TY books ever since Nuphy showed me the sentence "My brother has a sharp ax, but he does not work." (Manam brālim ir ass cirvis, bet viņš nestrādā.) For all![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
fainic_thu_fein's worried about TY Irish "teaching [me] to speak like a 100 year old man from the bog", TY Latvian seems aimed at making you speak like a 100 year old farmhand from the pastoral idylls of Latgale.
By contrast, in all their eagerness to make Latvian fun and relevant, the authors of Colloquial Latvian seem to have forgotten to include the grammar. Okay, that's an exaggeration. I can see not wanting to chart-bomb the casual learner, but it's more than a little ridiculous to expect them to pick up a fundamental feature like definite adjective endings just from reading the dialogues. I thought Nuphy's book would more than make up for this lack and it has. And for all the talk about the quaintness of the scenarios in TY Latvian (so far I've learned more words for farm implements than for modes of transport), the current dialogue in Colloquial Latvian concerns EU agricultural subsidies ("mūsu kaimiņvalstu lauksaimniecība tiek subsidēta"). No wonder it's taken me three days to push through it!
So far I've twigged to only a few real divergences in grammar. TY talks of an "instrumental case" and actually justifies it with a handful of relic forms. It gives three different forms for the locative of demonstratives, albeit admitting that only one set of these "are used in a colloquial style". (How many do you think Colloquial gives? That's right--"Pick it up as you go along, wuss!") And it lists alternative imperative forms for ā-stem verbs whose absence from my other materials suggests are probably obsolete. But best of all it includes side notes on the kinds of linguistic idiosyncrasies which are the reason I got into the language business in the first place. Take this gem from page 53:
But I have to say the chief reason that I've stuck with the language this long is that the words are freaking adorable. I mean these are real everyday sentences:
This book has been a legend to me even among members of the Old School All Grammar All The Time TY books ever since Nuphy showed me the sentence "My brother has a sharp ax, but he does not work." (Manam brālim ir ass cirvis, bet viņš nestrādā.) For all
fainic_thu_fein's worried about TY Irish "teaching [me] to speak like a 100 year old man from the bog", TY Latvian seems aimed at making you speak like a 100 year old farmhand from the pastoral idylls of Latgale.By contrast, in all their eagerness to make Latvian fun and relevant, the authors of Colloquial Latvian seem to have forgotten to include the grammar. Okay, that's an exaggeration. I can see not wanting to chart-bomb the casual learner, but it's more than a little ridiculous to expect them to pick up a fundamental feature like definite adjective endings just from reading the dialogues. I thought Nuphy's book would more than make up for this lack and it has. And for all the talk about the quaintness of the scenarios in TY Latvian (so far I've learned more words for farm implements than for modes of transport), the current dialogue in Colloquial Latvian concerns EU agricultural subsidies ("mūsu kaimiņvalstu lauksaimniecība tiek subsidēta"). No wonder it's taken me three days to push through it!
So far I've twigged to only a few real divergences in grammar. TY talks of an "instrumental case" and actually justifies it with a handful of relic forms. It gives three different forms for the locative of demonstratives, albeit admitting that only one set of these "are used in a colloquial style". (How many do you think Colloquial gives? That's right--"Pick it up as you go along, wuss!") And it lists alternative imperative forms for ā-stem verbs whose absence from my other materials suggests are probably obsolete. But best of all it includes side notes on the kinds of linguistic idiosyncrasies which are the reason I got into the language business in the first place. Take this gem from page 53:
The verb 'klausīt' can have an object in the dative or the accusative: the acc. indicating habitual, frequent, or intensive action, the dative an occasional action. The same refers to some other verbs, e.g. 'lūgt (to beg), sist (to hit)', etc.Ar you kidding me? I've seen various constructions for expressing habitual action, but this is not something I've ever seen expressed through the case of the direct object. Wacky!
But I have to say the chief reason that I've stuck with the language this long is that the words are freaking adorable. I mean these are real everyday sentences:
- Mana mīļā māte ir mājās. "My dear mother is at home."
- Pļavā ir zaļa zale "There is green grass in the meadow."
- Laiks ir jauks. "The weather is fine."
- Vai saule silda zemi. "The sun warms the earth."
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That reminds me of my visit to my French pen-friend—he had a French–German dictionary he had got from his grandfather, and it was full of military vocabulary (including the phrases in the little phrasebook section I think it had) but light on useful stuff.
But it did come in very handy when we played a Pictionary-like game - he drew a bomb fuse (the cord thingy) and I decided to take his dictionary after all (rather than mine) to look up the French word because I knew it would be in there :) And indeed, it translated "Lunte" to "mèche".
Apparently, that's not even the primary meaning of "mèche" (there's also "drill", "forelock", "wisp", and "wick", for example), but I'm glad he picked that one to illustrate the word :)