language stuff

I had one of those "you know you're in the SCA when..." moments recently, except it's not about the SCA. YKYitSCAW... you have a book written entirely in languages you don't read, but you don't care (usually because you bought it for the pictures/facsimiles). Well, my biblical concordance has content in Hebrew (duh), Aramaic (apparently), and Latin (title page and TOC, not guts), but not English. And no pictures this time. :-) And I don't care, because you use it to look up specific words (comprehension not strictly required here, just verb-conjugation skills) and the citations are comprehensible. ( Read more... )

I learned another chapter in the Hebrew book today. ( this is a nifty language )

The book has exercises both for comprehension and generation. For people -- well, at least this person, but I think this is general -- reading is much easier than generating. For programming computers it's the other way around; generation is much easier than parsing. (I used to do that kind of programming.)

I also find reading and writing much easier than listening and speaking. I need to perceive how a word is put together, and that's harder in spoken form (homophones, poor articulation, etc). I wonder when that will get easier.