Source
r/languagelearning•
Pathawi

Reading On-Line in Less Common L2: Seeking Advice

Media

I'm working on learning Tigrinya, but am still at a fairly early stage. I essentially know the language's morphology & syntax, but my vocabulary is too small for meaningful independent reading without a dictionary. This year, Google Translate added Tigrinya as one of its supported languages, & it's surprisingly good. Unfortunately, there are a couple challenges to using the extension, & Google Translate more broadly:

  1. For some reason, the extension cannot identify Tigrinya text as Tigrinya, & automatically treats it as Amharic. To get the translation from Tigrinya, I have to go thru a long drop-down: Easy once, but a drag as it adds up.
  2. The Fidäl script that's used to write Tigrinya is an abugida that doesn't mark gemination, & doesn't distinguish between Cə & C∅. So, for example, when I encounter the word ምልውዋጥ (exchange), it could be məlwəwaṭ or mələwəwaṭ, but in fact it's məlləwəwaṭ.

So here's what I do: I copy a paragraph of my reading into a text editor, replace the spaces with line breaks, & then drop that into the Google Translate website. I then look at two windows next to one another: the original Tigrinya on the left, Google Translate on the right. As I read the original, I glance across to the right, rapidly deleting the words I know, & retain those that are new to me. Of the remainder, those that I think I might want to recognise the next time I read I look up one at a time in either geezexperience.com—which has audio recordings for lexical entries—or more slowly in the only decent print dictionary—which has a pronunciation guide for the ambiguities of the script.

Of course, this is way easier than reading Tigrinya text would have been in 1982. But it still seems to me like working with the Google Translate extension really ought to be easier. Is anyone in a similar situation? Have you got tricks or other advice to make something like this more efficient?

Posted Aug 28, 2022, 10:34 PM UTC

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IAmGilGunderson🇺🇸 N | 🇮🇹 (Braying Mule Stage/A2)•

If you are reading websites on a browser like Chrome you can use the translate.google.com and paste the url to the page in it. Then click the link it puts on the second pane. It will translate the whole page. (usually.)

Example: https://www-bbc-com.translate.goog/tigrinya?_x_tr_sl=ti&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp

No idea if that helps you at all. If I were in the situation I might use it for making parallel texts.

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PathawiOP•

Thanks! What I actually would like to be able to do is translate individuated words, rather than the text as a whole.

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kfajesus🇺🇸(N) 🇻🇪(C1) 🇵🇹(B1) 🇪🇹(A2) 🇫🇷(A2) 🇯🇵(A2) •

ሰላም! ከመይ ኣለኻ/ኺ? Amharic learner here (although every now and then I'm tempted to try Tigrinya too).

Unfortunately I don't think there are any tools like the one you describe that can really work with fidel. I would suggest copy/pasting your whole text into a Google doc, and maybe color coding words based on familiarity? Idk, or yell at Steve Kauffman until Ethiopian languages become available on lingq.

Also, let me know what kind of resources you've found for Tigrinya, it's been VERY difficult to find things for Amharic. መልካም ዕድል!

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PathawiOP•

ጽቡቕ ኣሎኹ፡ እግዚኣብሔር ይመስገን።

Finding resources for Tigrinya has been a challenge. I learned ግዕዝ first which has helped quite a lot (it's far closer to ትግርኛ than it is to አማርኛ). There's only one textbook I know of for Tigrinya, ትግርኛ ንዛረብ from Indiana University's National African Language Resource Center. Unfortunately, it's quite bad for many reasons, & is not designed for independent use. I am getting some use out of it, but only by using it with other resources & by asking Tigrinya-speakers a lot of questions about its contents. Wolf Leslau's Documents Tigrigna from 1941 is the only reasonably complete grammar, tho John Mason's Tigrinya Grammar from the '90s is a useful supplement. (There's also Tesfay Tewolde Yohannes' A Modern Grammar of Tigrinya, but it's geared toward broader theoretical syntax issues, & does not have the kind of details of verbal conjugation a learner needs.)

There are two readers that I know of: Edward Ullendorff's Tigrinya Chrestomathy and Mulugeta Girmay Melles' Tigrinya Reader and Grammar. Both look like they would be a great set of readings after a student has assembled a working vocabulary & a good knowledge of morphology. I have the latter but not the former, but am using them anyhow. I have complaints about both, but they're both decent. (The Reader and Grammar is not adequate as a grammar, but I've found it to be an occasionally helpful addition to Leslau.)

Thomas Leiper Kane's Tigrinya-English dictionary is really, really excellent, but it's huge. geezexperience.com is also a pretty decent digital dictionary. There's a word list by Abraham Teklu and Andrew Tadross (you may have seen its Amharic counterpart), but the Eritrean people I've shown it to have felt that the vocabulary is very Amharic. Tadross was a Peace Corps volunteer in Ethiopia's Tigray region, I think, so this may reflect a difference between Tigray Tigrinya & Eritrean Tigrinya. In any case, since I'm trying to learn with Eritrean people, I don't feel that I can trust Teklu & Tadross as a source.

I wish Tigrinya had an equivalent of Leslau's Amharic Textbook or the FSI course!

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ItsNotMyFavorite•

Somewhat unrelated, but that lack of gemination in the writing will eventually be overcome with practice. I speak another Ethio-Semitic language that actually does mark gemination, but even looking at the word you wrote (and not knowing Tigrinya) I could feel where it would be geminated. All these related languages just have a cadence to them that you'll eventually get

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