hindilingo - not conquerd but more comfortable

Now at Level 4 in Family, so while I would not say mastered, I am more comfortable. This is one of the very few times I wish there was lesson of nothing but conjugation for third person plurals, though. Usually I go to the next lesson once I hit four and use level 4 to 5 for review, but I'm still very shaky; knowing is not the same thing as internalizing. I may start the next lesson and see.

(I do wish I could individually erase progress on a Lesson--Family--and start over entirely. The review simply doesn't have the build up to quality which I'd like to do again from the start.)

Hindi conjugations are so far fairly straightforward, no tricks, so it's very much repetition of nailing the rules in for matching them by gender to subject into my brain. With possessives (my, yours, his, her, Julia's, Raj's) matching to noun (son, daughter, brother, sister, book) by gender already, my mind was ready and loves the consistency, it's just repetition. I think it's the female not automatically becoming male but staying its own thing in plurals when I'm used to defaulting male. It's nice, though, it just means if I don't stop short and think, I go to default male plural like an idiot.

Currently using 'my girls'/'our girls' to remind myself; could I sub in my girls/our girls and match for possessive and noun in subject? If so, verb goes female with feminine ending. If I sub in 'our boys', its male plural with the male plural ending. I'm also using the deer/deer principle for nouns that do not pluralize; check the possessive, if it's plural, the verb is plural, just like English.

I am genuinely surprised I haven't had more structural grammar (aka sentence structure) problems with switching the verb to the end and then arranging objects (direct and indirect) and prepositions inside between that and subject. The structure in simple sentences is perfectly logical (according to my brain, thank you!) and while I get this will get much more complicated in complex sentences, it's reassuring there is one part of this I am not utter shit at from the get-go. Basically, this is the literal one thing I do not make mistakes in.

Yes, this is a boring update, just a lot of 'wow, I am a-learning'. Can't lie, part of Not Failing Hindi may be put up to Welsh.

Okay, so when Duolingo adds new languages, I sometimes do a lesson or two in a couple just to see what's up because we live in the time of Online Babel, this shit is amazing. I ended up doing quite a bit in Welsh, mostly due to having read Here Be Dragons at a formative age and getting super into Wales, but also because of this. I discovered that I had found a language with perfect phonics, which for a phonics person is the goddamn holy grail. Once I learned the alternate sounds and specific variations, read = pronunciation, which all English speakers first second third fiftieth language know is not something English allows without serious penalties when it comes to verbal. If you're an English speaker who grew up on strict phonics first, you know read = pronounce is an automatic function you can't stop but resign yourself to knowing whatever is now stuck in your head is a.) wrong and b.) will always be what you translate from once you learn the correct pronunciation. because no matter how you tell it this is English it's okay, it's--to my brain at least--fundamentally wrong English from the get-go and always will be.

Raise your hand if Beau is still 'bewww' or something and it's still a sixteenth-beat for you to say 'bow' but no matter what, you still think 'bewwww' (or your alternative)? Yeah. I learned that word in third grade and the correct pronunciation at the same time, but doesn't matter; I read it on the board first. I have an entire portion of my language center devoted to mapping between "Read Pronunciation" and "Real Pronunciation". I'm fast, don't get me wrong, but there's always a translation. Hearing it and then seeing it doesn't always help, especially if there's a delay; ask me about solder/sauter and how now, I sometimes don't remember which is the verbal an which is the written because 'heard' before 'seen'? Brains, dude.

(Non native-tongue English speakers: yes, we do it, too. If you're wondering if it's some kind of reflection on your mastery, it is--your English is now on par with any native, congratulations. Those mental lists come standard with the language; you're doing it just like a native. The challenge for all of us is speed of translating 'how it sounds read' to 'how it sounds spoken' and that is for us all a work in progress. My personal goal is quarter beat delay at maximum. The more you use it spoken the easier it gets, but for me, its very rare I can get anything on the 'Read Pronunciation List' to the 'Read and Real Pronunciation List No Mapping Needed'.)

Welsh, though? Provided you learn Welsh pronunciation of those letters? This does not happen. It was so liberating and I learned that sometimes, it is possible to trust phonics. The grammar does get more complex, but it's a lot easier to internalize that when you aren't also mentally remapping words between 'read' and 'sound'.

So far, Hindi is pretty much the same way, and this time, I trust that how I read it is indeed how it sounds. One hundred percent of the time so far, when it sounds different than I read it, I made a mistake. And I don't have to do a remap, just sound it out again then read it correctly and it's fixed, no alternate list needed. My brain loves letters matching sounds, it'll happily erase without penalty when it's a bad sound to letter match. Frankly, it's beautiful. Read errors are much less a problem than read-speak mapping; you can fix read errors, but read-speak are fundamental to the language, at least in my brain.

Though I do wonder now if learning French might help, but mapping across languages after the fact might not be much faster.