I haven't updated on the #PassiveEuskaraProject (or in general) in a while but it's still going and it's super cool to see how I'm catching words and structures now! I still have no idea of what most words are or what most sentences are doing, but ooooo it's so exciting to see how my reception improves as I literally do NOTHING other than listen to cool music.
I'm (slowly) watching John Wick 4 this week (with @croquetapeligro's translation, holla) and ahhhh I know some things!
Honestly the idea here is to start recognizing words and structures, then to start understanding sentences, and waaaaaaaaaay down the road to actually produce them myself (beyond a few I can just up and mimic, I mean), so this is actually going incredibly well for literally just listening to Spotify songs for a month
Anyway yesterday on the train I watched #Errementari for the first time, both audio and captions in Euskara, and I understood an entire sentence (Ez dugu egun osoak) and some clauses here and there 😌 And I was able to get enough random words to not get lost at any point!
Today’s #PassiveEuskaraProject insight is that I know maybe 20 more words than a month ago and from that I am honestly shocked at the sheer AMOUNT of Euskara songs that casually talk about hearts or eyes or looking or feelings
Idk what I was expecting but it definitely wasn’t this
Me looking at verses in this one song I know the meaning of like "this word must be some sort of directionality but it has an entire three syllables so it's less likely to be a preposition (or at least not a common one) what if it's a verb and if so who's the referent" is certainly my #PassiveEuskaraProject gender
This is a puzzle and I fully intend to solve it without looking at the picture on the box!
I wish someone were actually monitoring my brain, because while I still only know, like, 30 words (up until last week I knew like 5), I'm hearing songs differently every day. I can follow sounds a lot better now! I can now repeat sentences even if I don't know what they are!
Ok let me begin by saying I've always hated singing in front of people and I'm pretty tone deaf, I'm legit so scared to share this?
But in other news we're on day 5 of #PassiveEuskaraProject! I did look up the translation for this song (Ikusi mendizaleak), and that helped with memorization 😌 I thiiiink I'm pronouncing everything correctly, too?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2tyBc2BHDM
edit x2: literally it's been 2 hours and drive won't process this 2-minute SD video, so here it is on youtube
Day 4 of #PassiveEuskaraProject: logic says if "Euskal Herria" is Basque Country and my friend Haritz's name means oak, that "en" must mean something like "of" and we get "land of oaks" (Oakland, if you will).
Still focusing on nailing phonetics and on trying to recognize roots/words/clauses from one song to another, no dictionaries or grammars yet.
Also I'm a couple hours in but I'm already recognizing words (? clauses?) across songs! Haven't opened a dictionary/grammar yet and I'm not sure of when I will, I think first I want to get the phonetics down? Just off the songs and sometimes-accompanying-lyrics?
What's wild about getting Spoti to play you random songs in minoritized languages (at least ones present in Spain) is that it'll play you a happy clown song about (I think) chocolate and kisses, immediately followed by a song that I have no idea of what it says, but the cover has a (traditional?) masked person pointing a gun at you, also there's flames everywhere.
Ártemis López