Rant delayed by another rant
I was going to post about portrayals of the Spanish, but lj wasn't loading and I really need to keep up on my Basque lessons, so I went to do one of those first.
This course is starting to get to me. I'm learning a ton and I swear to God I'll finish, but it's not easy when it gives instructions like "Give the English equivalents for the following verbs:" when exactly one of the verbs has appeared in a vocabulary list before--no wait, two, I forgot the one that appeared in the THIRD LESSON and was NEVER USED AGAIN. ALSO, the verb from the vocab list translates in Spanish to "hacer," which, if you know any Spanish, you also know does not exactly have a simple English equivalent! (I guessed "make" since we'd been learning what in Spanish would be "Amaia está haciendo una torta," but the activity wanted "to do.") Next activity: conjugate these verbs! Okay, so it's a periphrastic conjugation and I know how to do the auxiliary verb part, but if Basque verbs have any regular pattern of conjugation we haven't learned it. "Bring," for example, is "ekarri," which OBVIOUSLY is "dakart" in the first person singular-singular present. (It's "dakartzat" if I'm bringing things plural.) What I'm supposed to do is magically know all the participly things (I haven't been taught the proper word for this form) for all these infinitives that I'm supposed to know, perhaps extrapolating from the pairs I do know: egin/egiten, irten/irteten, sartu/sartzen, edan/edaten, jan/jaten, ikusi/ikusten. The pattern seems to be that -n becomes -ten, -u becomes -zen, and -i becomes -ten. After some guesswork, it appears that while -tu becomes -tzen, -du ALSO becomes -tzen, except that after z they become -ten (I guess even Basques don't want to try to pronounce "moztzen"). I couldn't get "ipini" and "idatzi" at all, perhaps because, upon correction, they become "ipintzen" and "idazten." Right. I should have known that -tzi is obviously an orthographic correction for the -zi stem, which then just adds -ten like a good little participly thing, whereas I guess the nasal at the end of ipini's stem is having some sort of effect on the following -t-. (Most other languages encourage -nt- as an internal cluster, but Basque dislikes it for some reason.)
I guess part of the appeal is the joy of reasoning and discovering these things for myself. Right?
Edit: I know this is just a Spanish-English translation problem, but it would REALLY HELP if the instructions would tell me when I need to use the (redundant) subjects for my sentences. If I could easily just click over to the Spanish view for a second to see whether I'm supposed to be translating "Estoy en la cocina" or "Yo estoy en la cocina," it would save me a lot of hair-pulling trying to figure out if I've remembered the right word for kitchen. Seriously, it wants "estoy" increasingly often but still usually wants "yo estoy." I seriously, seriously recommend selecting Spanish as your support language if you try to do this thing.
This course is starting to get to me. I'm learning a ton and I swear to God I'll finish, but it's not easy when it gives instructions like "Give the English equivalents for the following verbs:" when exactly one of the verbs has appeared in a vocabulary list before--no wait, two, I forgot the one that appeared in the THIRD LESSON and was NEVER USED AGAIN. ALSO, the verb from the vocab list translates in Spanish to "hacer," which, if you know any Spanish, you also know does not exactly have a simple English equivalent! (I guessed "make" since we'd been learning what in Spanish would be "Amaia está haciendo una torta," but the activity wanted "to do.") Next activity: conjugate these verbs! Okay, so it's a periphrastic conjugation and I know how to do the auxiliary verb part, but if Basque verbs have any regular pattern of conjugation we haven't learned it. "Bring," for example, is "ekarri," which OBVIOUSLY is "dakart" in the first person singular-singular present. (It's "dakartzat" if I'm bringing things plural.) What I'm supposed to do is magically know all the participly things (I haven't been taught the proper word for this form) for all these infinitives that I'm supposed to know, perhaps extrapolating from the pairs I do know: egin/egiten, irten/irteten, sartu/sartzen, edan/edaten, jan/jaten, ikusi/ikusten. The pattern seems to be that -n becomes -ten, -u becomes -zen, and -i becomes -ten. After some guesswork, it appears that while -tu becomes -tzen, -du ALSO becomes -tzen, except that after z they become -ten (I guess even Basques don't want to try to pronounce "moztzen"). I couldn't get "ipini" and "idatzi" at all, perhaps because, upon correction, they become "ipintzen" and "idazten." Right. I should have known that -tzi is obviously an orthographic correction for the -zi stem, which then just adds -ten like a good little participly thing, whereas I guess the nasal at the end of ipini's stem is having some sort of effect on the following -t-. (Most other languages encourage -nt- as an internal cluster, but Basque dislikes it for some reason.)
I guess part of the appeal is the joy of reasoning and discovering these things for myself. Right?
Edit: I know this is just a Spanish-English translation problem, but it would REALLY HELP if the instructions would tell me when I need to use the (redundant) subjects for my sentences. If I could easily just click over to the Spanish view for a second to see whether I'm supposed to be translating "Estoy en la cocina" or "Yo estoy en la cocina," it would save me a lot of hair-pulling trying to figure out if I've remembered the right word for kitchen. Seriously, it wants "estoy" increasingly often but still usually wants "yo estoy." I seriously, seriously recommend selecting Spanish as your support language if you try to do this thing.