I can read (and write) Romansh!

[pne]

This morning I was giggling like a little schoolboy.

Why? I had asked a question in the Romansh Wikipedia (six [short] paragraphs!) yesterday and felt that I had managed to produce something that was, if not idiomatic, at least comprehensible. I felt totally proud of myself for achieving that much after only having had contact with the language for—what, two weeks or so?

What definitely helped, of course, was the availability of an online German–Romansh dictionary, which even provides conjugation tables for each verb lemma—faster than looking up in a paper dictionary.

Then this morning, I found that I had received an answer. Yay! I had been understood!

And what's more, I understood the response! And I only had to look up a handful of words.

Here it really helps that Romansh is a Romance language, so you (well, I) can understand quite a bit just from the cognates with languages I already know, such as French and English. For example, "consequenza" or "differents" I don't have to look up, and I doubt most readers of this entry would, either.

I think this ease of recognition gives Romansh a pretty low barrier to entry for me compared to many other languages: if you can more easily read texts in it, you feel more accomplished than if at first you can only read "See Spot run" because of the gigantic vocabulary barrier.

Anyway, the whole thing left me all giggly and happy and accomplished, and feeling all clever.

Comments

[pthalo]

that's awesome. :)

I'm staying away from Serbian wiki... well, that's not true. I routinely read articles on stuff i already know something about in English or Hungarian. and i'm a chicken and read in latin instead of cyrillic. (i read faster in latin, so my comprehension is better, so i read more in latin, so my comprehension stays better in latin, but i forced myself to read something in cyrillic and despite working less in cyrillic i still was able to read faster than the last time i paid attention to how fast i was reading so yay that).

but editing something? man, i'd feel like i'd be creating more work for them with my "well, i can understand what you're *trying* to say, but..." sentences. ;)

did s/he/it say anything about your Rumantsch? :)



and i totally get fed up with "see spot run". And "you should try to write simple sentences". I get bored of "Gde je Split? Split je u Jugoslaviji. Gde je Ljubljana? Ljubljana je u Jugoslaviji. Gde je Subotica? Subotica je na karta dole." really, really quickly. (Where is Split? Split is in Yugoslavia [it was an old book]. Where is Ljubljana? Ljubljana is in Yugoslavia (Slovenia, really). Where is Subotica? Subotica is on the map, at the top.)

So I just throw myself in head first and attack the language with brute force. :)

[pne.livejournal.com]

but editing something? man, i'd feel like i'd be creating more work for them with my "well, i can understand what you're *trying* to say, but..." sentences. ;)

I suppose so :) I thought that fixing up something that's there is less work than actually creating an article (or section of one) from scratch, so I didn't feel too bad about writing, say, Districts dal chantun Grischun (http://rm.wikipedia.org/wiki/Districts_dal_chantun_Grischun) (Districts of Grisons). And I'm thinking of expanding Hamburg (http://rm.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamburg) beyond the two sentences it has now.

That ("fixing is easier than writing") may or may not be true -- I know that translating can be easier than correcting a bad translation -- but I went with it anyway.

Plus there only seem to be a handful of active editors there anyway, so I figured they can use any help they can get. (Again, may or may not be true if the "help" is of sufficiently bad quality... such as this one user who creates lots of city and country stubs, only the base template he uses is grammatically incorrect, so there are dozens and dozens of articles with exactly the same mistakes, fixing which would get old really soon.)

did s/he/it say anything about your Rumantsch? :)

Nope! Neither of the two people who's commented at me so far has said anything. (Though one of them is also a non-native speaker. On one of the articles he created, he added a little banner saying "Warning: created by a student, has not yet been checked for spelling mistakes" which I snagged as a template and may use in the future.)