Hi everyone!
I'm an English teacher and amateur methodologist, and I've been developing a system/curriculum of language learning that I want to test on a language I'm unfamiliar with. I chose Latvian, since I reside in St Petersburg (not far from the country), and it seems to share a lot of grammatical features that I recognise from Russian and German. The only issue with my system is that it relies heavily on translating "ideas" into the target language, and ideally that means translating correctly, which is difficult at the moment since I don't know any Latvians! So until my holiday to Riga in a few months, where I hope to pick up some friends to keep a check on my accuracy, I'm hoping to get some tips here on certain features.
For the moment, I have a couple of questions.
I want to communicate the meaning of "hard to do sth" / "easy to do sth" into Latvian. I’ve already learned the adjectives ‘grūts’ and ‘viegls’, and (correct me if I’m wrong), it’s okay to say something like “Krievu valoda ir grūta”, or “tā ir viegla valoda”. But it’s a bit harder to confidently translate something like: “It’s hard to understand Russian.”
Google gives me: “Grūti saprast krievu valoda", which would be [adjective + infinitive], same as English, but I feel like this isn't quite right, since google searches show other variants, such as “grūti saprotams” or even “grūti saprotamā”. With “saprotams” I can see that it is a passive form, which makes sense, but I can’t make sense of “saprotamā”.
Can anyone give some information about how it works, expressing something like “hard to do / easy to do sth”?
Thanks
)))
I'm an English teacher and amateur methodologist, and I've been developing a system/curriculum of language learning that I want to test on a language I'm unfamiliar with. I chose Latvian, since I reside in St Petersburg (not far from the country), and it seems to share a lot of grammatical features that I recognise from Russian and German. The only issue with my system is that it relies heavily on translating "ideas" into the target language, and ideally that means translating correctly, which is difficult at the moment since I don't know any Latvians! So until my holiday to Riga in a few months, where I hope to pick up some friends to keep a check on my accuracy, I'm hoping to get some tips here on certain features.
For the moment, I have a couple of questions.
I want to communicate the meaning of "hard to do sth" / "easy to do sth" into Latvian. I’ve already learned the adjectives ‘grūts’ and ‘viegls’, and (correct me if I’m wrong), it’s okay to say something like “Krievu valoda ir grūta”, or “tā ir viegla valoda”. But it’s a bit harder to confidently translate something like: “It’s hard to understand Russian.”
Google gives me: “Grūti saprast krievu valoda", which would be [adjective + infinitive], same as English, but I feel like this isn't quite right, since google searches show other variants, such as “grūti saprotams” or even “grūti saprotamā”. With “saprotams” I can see that it is a passive form, which makes sense, but I can’t make sense of “saprotamā”.
Can anyone give some information about how it works, expressing something like “hard to do / easy to do sth”?
Thanks