7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 95
Two-language immersion, Work hours in Korea and New Zealand, and Tolkien's Sindarin
Hey language lovers,
I hope you all had a lovely week!
Updates
Mine was great but tiring.
I had a rather busy week followed by loads of plans during the weekend so I didn’t get to rest at all.
I didn’t study languages much but found small windows of time to play some video games in German or read a few webtoons in Korean. I also listened to an interesting (and funny) podcast episode in Japanese about words.
There won’t be a newsletter next week as I’ll be catching up on a few other tasks and taking a breather for once.
Alright, let’s dive into what you came for now!
7 Bullet Points
Each week, I share 7 things about languages.
I hope they can help you improve your journey, tickle your curiosity, and inspire you to keep exploring.
A quick reminder first: I’m not affiliated with any resource so far. Every recommendation you find below comes from my own research and experiences.
🎥 One video
How to Give Yourself Feedback Language Learning — By Naila Farhana
I enjoy finding new language-learning creators and finding non-English native ones feels even better, so I was happy to fall upon Naila.
This video was a great reminder that when we’re trying to give ourselves focus, we shouldn’t try to find every little thing that’s wrong. Instead, we should choose what we want to improve above all. Pronunciation? Grammar? Vocabulary? …
Choosing one can help a lot noticing what can be improved!
And for the rest, there are always native speakers helping for free on HiNative!
📚 One article I read
How to Learn (But Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour — By Tim Ferriss
This 13-year-old piece by the creator of the 4-hour workweek caught my eye for one main reason: I love Tim’s podcast and opinions but I absolutely hate the title of this piece. The dissonance made me click.
Well, I stand by not liking the title but the idea behind it really is an interesting one.
In short, he explains how to deconstruct a language’s structure to get its basic grammar patterns so you can start using it and learn from the errors you make.
I’d recommend you read the long version though!
✍🏽 One article I wrote
How to Immerse in Two Languages at the Same Time
In this old piece, I shared a few different ways I’ve immersed myself in multiple languages at the same time so I could improve more than one language at a time. While I currently don’t immerse in multiple languages in the same structured manner, I will probably do it again early next year once I have more me-time!
If you’re struggling with improving two (or more) languages at the same time, I hope this piece can help you!
🎧 One podcast episode
Episode 24: Testing a New Language — By Love, Joy, and Languages
Like most people, I often feel FOMO without even realizing it’s happening. And for this reason, I have a confession to make: I’ve been learning Taiwanese Hokkien on Glossika ever since I researched the language for my deep-dive piece about it.
This episode felt directed at me because I often feel a need to learn a new shiny language. I gather resources “for the future” and end up never touching them.
Heidi’s experience with trying out Korean for a 7-day project reminded me of what I just did with Taiwanese Hokkien. Trying a language is fine as long as proper boundaries are set. In my case, despite having found many good resources, I chose to stick to Glossika’s free course as long as it doesn’t overtake my other languages.
How about you? How do you handle your thirst for new languages? Let me know in the comments!
🌎 One cultural aspect to discover
Work hours in Korea and New Zealand
This week we’re flying to the other side of the world, to talk about two extremes: South Korea and Australia.
South Korea, like Japan, has a lot to improve when it comes to allowing its citizens to have a good work-life balance. With 1,915 hours per person worked in 2021, Korea was the fifth country (among the 44 listed by the OECD) with the most hours worked in a year.
Despite this, Korea also has strong laws protecting workers. For one, the number of overtime hours is limited to a certain amount (depending on the company) and overtime work is 50% higher than normal pay (compared to 25-50% in France or Japan for example).
Korea’s work-life relies, like Japan, on “face” and staying in the office for long hours to show how “dedicated” you are to the company. The result? Korea has remained the country with the highest suicide rate in the OECD… since 2003… and by far.
Looking further south, New Zealand is a country often seen as a place where people go to relax. This is not completely true. After all, the average annual hours spent in 2021 was 1,730, barely above Spain’s 1,641, and far above the average EU number of 1,566.
And yet, New Zealand was also among the countries where the 4-day work week was first implemented in companies, showing undeniably great results, with more committed and happier employees.
Furthermore, 90% of the country's workers say their employer would let them take time off for special family events, according to the New Zealand Families Commission. And 3 out of 4 workers rated their work as being flexible.
Something I’m sure we’d all love to be able to say about our companies!
📜 One quote to ponder
“Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the lifelong attempt to acquire it.” —Albert Einstein.
🌐 One Lesser-Known Language (LKL)
Sindarin - A highly inspired Conlang
With The Rings of Power coming out earlier this year, I thought it’d be a great opportunity to dive into one of the languages created for the world of The Lord of the Rings.
I chose Sindarin because it is the Elvish language spoken by the elves in Middle Earth (instead of Quenya which is spoken by the Elves who left for Valinor).1
Quenya was inspired by the Finnish language but Sindarin was based on Welsh instead. Sindarin shares a few words with Quenya as it is an evolution of Old Sindarin which itself shared many similar words with Quenya.
The typical scripts used for Sindarin are the Tengwar or the Cirth (Elvish runes) but I’ll stick to a romanized version for this presentation..
Sindarin is an SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) language in which the indirect object will usually appear after the direct object unless a particle introduces it.
There is no gender nor indefinite article but there is a complex plural system.
Indeed, EVERY vowel within the noun gets modified in order to create the plural.
For example:
adaneth (woman) becomes edenith (women)
brannon (lord) becomes brennyn (lords)
This being said, some “plural suffixes” can also be used in specific cases:
-rim indicates a race so nogoth (meaning “dwarf”) can become nogothrim to mean “the race of Dwarves.”
-ath indicates a group of something so elen (meaning “star”) can become elenath to mean “a group of stars” or “all the stars in the sky.”
Verbs are beasts in and of their own. Enough so for their initial introduction in this complete grammar course of Sindarin to take 25 pages out of one hundred.
In short, Sindarin has two main types of verbs which are generally known as A-stem verbs (verbs finishing with the vowel “a”) and I-stem verbs (the rest). Pronouns are added as suffixes to the verb. They change depending on the type of stem verb and person.
If, however, the verb is an I-stem verb, the existing vowel in the verb will change if the suffix has an “i.” How it changes depends on the vowel itself. For example, an a or an o will become an e, but an i will stay an i.
If we choose the verb tol (“to come”), it will conjugate as follows:
As you may notice the 3rd person is tôl, this happens because there is no suffix for the 3rd person. Instead, the stem vowel is lengthened. (the ^ only makes the vowel longer.)
For the past tense of A-stem verbs, the pronominal suffix changes to a different form and that’s it. For I-stem verbs, however, it gets even more mind-blogging.
Not only does the vowel change mentioned above needs to be applied, but a consonant change also happens for the final consonant. This change varies depending on the person. For example, a final B would become MM for the 1st and 2nd person, but it would become an MP for the 3rd.
As far as I’ve seen, the future tense is the most simple one as it doesn’t require such vowel or consonant change. All it needs is a new version of the pronominal suffixes.
Alright! I’ve rambled enough so I’ll leave you with a few sentences:
Carfog i lam Thindrim? — Do you speak Sindarin? (informal)
Man i theled …? — What does … mean?
Galu — A blessing, good fortune (hello)
Man i eneth lîn? —What is your name? (formal)
i eneth nîn… — My name is…
Novaer — Farewell
If you wish to learn Sindarin, I highly recommend the grammar PDF I mentioned above (here is the website with the lessons and much more) but it lacks examples for the grammar in my opinion. This barebone website also goes into great detail about another difficult part I have skipped: consonant mutations.
You could couple those with this website which has a few sentences recorded or even
Finally, this dictionary would be quite useful, although I prefer this PDF version.
Thanks for reading, and see you in two weeks!
Mathias Barra
Interestingly enough, the elves in The Rings of Power used Quenya in episode 3 instead of Sindarin, something that stirred some backlash from the fans.