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Kanewai 2015: Team Caesar | ||
Tags: Super Challenge | Catalan | Ancient Greek | Turkish | Polyglot | Arabic | Total Annihilation Challenge (TAC) | Italian | Japanese | French | Spanish | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5012 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 137 of 331 15 April 2013 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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You are so good you nearly make me feel guilty about my laziness. :-)
And I especially love your recommendations on tv series originally in the target languages. Thanks for those 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4892 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 138 of 331 16 April 2013 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Late Nights and Guilty Pleasures
Cavesa, I think I just bounce around so much that it looks like I'm doing a lot. When it comes down to actual studying I fade out after about fifteen minutes. Meanwhile, I had too many late nights last week, either watching tv or being unable to put down a book. I was pretty exhausted by the weekend ... Spanish Late Nights #1-4: Isabel This is full on operatic drama at it's best! I'm hooked. Princess Isabel and Prince Alfonso are taken from their mother and forced to live in the dangerous world of the royal court (Spain, 2012). ελληνικά (Ancient Greek) I'm up to Chapter VII in Pharr. This is a review chapter, and I'm treating it like I treated languages in college: I made flashcards, and I'm drilling with them each day. My "Assimil-like" methods weren't working at all for Greek, so now I'm going to take a more traditional approach. The Iliad starts on Chapter XII, and I want to be ready for it. French Late night #5: Les misérables T4: L'idylle rue Plumet et l'épopée rue Saint-Denis - True to form, the last 100 pages of this part of the epic were epic. It takes me weeks to make it through 3/4 of each book, and then I can't put it down for the last 1/4. Late night #6: Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise; Émile Zola, 1883). I've been looking forward to reading this, one of the rare Zola novels that has a happy ending. Au Bonheur is the story of Denise, an orphan who moves to Paris and takes a job as a salesgirl in the city's first department store. I'm picturing The Devil Wears Prada in the Belle Époque. I also re-watched a few more episodes of Kaamelott, the vaguely sci-fi and very post-modern Holy Motors (Leos Carax, 2012), and the fantastic noir Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the Gallows, Louis Malle, 1958). Ascenseur reminded me a lot of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil, which came out the same year. I made myself finish Les compagnons du crépuscule T1: Le Sortilège du bois des brumes (François Bourgeon, 1984) just so I could log it. It's supposed to be a classic, and gets great reviews, but it's the first bd that I have actively disliked. The art was cheesy, and there was no flow to the story. It also used so much slang that I had to look up almost every three words. It wasn't fun. (almost) Late night #7: Le chat du rabbin T1: La Bar-Mitsva (Joann Sfar) arrived last night, and I had to force myself to put it down and go to bed. It's the story of a rabbi's cat in 1930's Algeria who eats the rabbi's parakeet, learns to talk, and starts causing mischief. I ordered this after watching Sfarr's Gainsbourg a few weeks ago. It's a fun story with a sly sense of humor, and so far the French is very easy to follow.  Edited by kanewai on 17 April 2013 at 7:58am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5212 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 139 of 331 25 April 2013 at 5:24am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for mentioning that - I've reserved it from the library; looks like fun. It' s also been made into a film, with Fellag (Monsieur Lazhar), Mathieu Amalric, Daniel Cohen (who recently directed Comme un Chef), and Sfar herself in roles; and the cat played by François Morin (whom you probably know from Kaamelott) . Unfortunately, looking at IMDB, it seems to have been released at one cinema only in the U.S., in Dec 2012. Edited by songlines on 25 April 2013 at 5:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4892 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 140 of 331 13 May 2013 at 11:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Heroic Hexameters
I've been busy this month, and so my language studies have been reduced to one active (Greek), one medium-active (French), and one orphaned (Spanish). I don't have the mental energy to actively study three at once. My original plan was to be studying French intensively this month, but Greek is hogging all my brain cells. Spanish I've watched eight out of thirteen episodes of Isabel (Spain, 2012). This has been my only link with Spanish the past couple weeks. I'm heading to Peru this summer with my family, so I need to make Spanish a priority again soon. ελληνικά (Ancient Greek) I finished Chapter XV in Pharr - and have now memorized the first six lines of the Iliad! The course asks you to memorize a line a day until you know the first fifty by heart. This feels amazing to me. It's also frakkin' hard as hell - beyond the Greek, I've had to learn strange English words like caesura, diëresis, and prosody; I've learned about poetic feet, and how dactyls and spondees create the heroic hexameter. Pharr starts each chapter by having you translate sentences from prose Greek > English, and then gives you the poetic version from Homer. So, the Greek in the exercise will look like this: Which of the gods first sowed discord between the two?. In Homer the actual order is the mind bending Which, between these two, of the gods, conflict they sowed through fighting? . It's a good approach - I don't think I could ever untangle these sentences on my own. For anyone else trying this, here are some audio links from Professor Paula Dunbar at Mount Holyoke: Greek 101 Audio 2 French I'm heading to Montréal for a few days at the end of the month, and was going to use that as an excuse to do all-French, all the time this month. I re-started FSI, and am now on Lesson 20 (out of 24). Someone once posted on HTLAL that no one ever finishes the FSI French course. I'm determined to prove them wrong. One day I will finish it. Lesson 20 is deep in the subjunctive, so it's very useful ... but Greek is really taking up too much of my free time to give this the attention it deserves. I'm half-way through Au Bonheur des Dames. It's a good story, but not as gripping as Germinal was. Parts of it are fascinating: the ruthless capitalist Mouret is building his mega-store, a world of fashion and consumerism, and destroying all the old family shops in the process. All the plot points from Mad Men and Ugly Betty and The Devil Wears Prada and even Occupy Wall Street are here - Zola did them first, a hundred years ago. Still, it feels like most of the book is describing the "new consumerism" rather than telling a story. It's more of a sociological work than an epic novel. I'm sure I miss a lot of the imagery and poetry, though - a native speaker might get more out of the writing than I do. For example, take this passage: Au-dehors, une aigre bise souffliait, les passants, surpis de ce retour d'hiver, filaient vite, en boutonnant leurs pantalots. This is what I understood: Outside, a bitter breeze blew; the pedestrians, surprised by this return of winter, filed by quickly, buttoning their jackets. A friend from Tahiti read this and said that bise was also an old-fashioned word for a 'light kiss,' and so now the breeze was a 'bitter light kiss' that blew across the pedestrians - which is a much more vivid image. This month is also the Cinémathèque Française Film Festival at the Honolulu Museum of Art, and there have been some excellent films. The two that stood out for me: Dans la maison (François Ozon, 2012) - A student starts writing about his friend's family in an English class, and things start to get creepy. Stars Kirstin Scott Thomas - I didn't know she was a French actress. There were a lot of literary references in the movie, and I actually understood some of them. It was another benefit of the Super Challenge! Tu seras mon fils (Gilles Legrand, 2011) - An intense family drama set in the Saint-Émilion wine region. Coming up this week: Thérèse Desqueyroux (Claude Miller, 2012) - Audrey Tatou is "une femme en quête de liberté." And the one I missed and that I hope to catch in the theater: Renoir (Gilles Bourdos, 2012) - It certainly looks like a beautiful movie. In BD land, I finished Le chat du rabbin T1: La Bar-Mitsva, which was great. Now I'm onto Siegfried T2: La Walkyrie, which so far is even better than the first book. It's a good story, and I love the art. Below, the Walkyrie bargains with something unnamed (so far) to learn Siegfried's fate:  Edited by kanewai on 14 May 2013 at 4:29am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| songlines Pro Member Canada flickr.com/photos/cp Joined 5212 days ago 729 posts - 1056 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French Personal Language Map | Message 141 of 331 15 May 2013 at 3:33am | IP Logged | ||
- How lovely; I adore Montreal! I'll try to finish off my series of posts on Montreal bookstores, but you may want to at least try to allow some time for visiting Librairie Michel Fortin: post 182. Also, I'm greatly enjoying Le chat du rabbin - thanks so much for your post on it! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4892 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 142 of 331 15 May 2013 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Librairie Michel Fortin and Planète BD (I didn't even know that was a physical place) are both on my list! I love cities that have lots of bookstores; I always think, right or wrong, that the citizens are just a bit more civilized than in other places.
Also: I saw Thérèse Desqueyroux last night, and it was awful. The book is a classic, and I'd like to read it one day. The movie had no life, and no energy. There went my brief winning streak with French movies. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 143 of 331 15 May 2013 at 11:35pm | IP Logged | ||
I loved that series. My wife recently gave me book 1 of Le troisième testament, which is Alex Alice's first book (drawn when he was still in school!). So far, it's good enough that I plan to read the other 3 books. Also, I'm sure you've seen this in my log, but I'd like to recommend Fred Vargas's detective novels. She's a master of eccentric but likable characters, the kind of people who fill all the background roles in Amélie. And her prose is often excellent. There's a decent chance you'd enjoy her work. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4892 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 144 of 331 17 May 2013 at 12:44am | IP Logged | ||
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I saw some of you discussing Fred Vargas on your blog too. I'm ready to take a break from
all my heavy reading, and she sounds just about right. Thanks for the rec! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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