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:
- 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.
- 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?
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