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Radioclare’s TAC log 2014 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4575 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 1 of 522 02 January 2014 at 10:13pm | IP Logged |
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This is the first time I've taken part in the TAC and I'm going to be focussing
exclusively on learning Croatian. I would love to tackle more languages but I know that - being realistic - I'm not going to have enough time to master more than one language this year. Croatian is my passion right now :) I started learning casually in 2012, ahead of my first visit to Croatia. I tend to take at least one holiday in central/eastern Europe each year, so my Januarys typically start with me purchasing 'Teach Yourself [insert Slavic language]' and working through the first six or so chapters, before real life gets in the way and/or I decide I'm never going to master the spelling/pronunciation/stress of this one and essentially give up. There is a bookshelf in my study which looks suspiciously like a shrine to Slavic languages I have failed to learn. There was no reason to assume that it would be any different when I started learning Croatian in January 2012 but, somehow, I completely fell in love with the language and found it the simplest Slavic language I had ever tried to learn. I made good progress with the TY book (by my standards!) and when I travelled to Croatia that summer, I was able to have some basic conversations. I absolutely loved Croatia and came back home inspired to keep on learning. Armed with new textbooks and dictionaries, I made pretty steady progress up to summer 2013, when I visited Croatia again and also went to Montenegro for the first time. Montenegro was a real highlight for me; I was staying in a small apartment with a crazy landlady who thought it was hilarious that I was learning the language. She took my admission that I could understand a bit as a licence to fire rapid bursts of Montenegrin at all hours of the day and night. It was a little scary - and I didn't do too well at responding to her in coherent, grammatical sentences - but it was a great feeling to understand the gist of what she was saying and to feel like we were communicating. She didn't speak any English, so there was no cheating. That should have inspired me to keep studying more than ever, but unfortunately work got in the way again and during the autumn I feel like I regressed rather than made any solid progress. So, my aim for this year is to make continuous progress in a forward direction and be able to have more fluent conversations when I hopefully visit the region again this summer. I also have a pile of Croatian-language novels which I bought in Dubrovnik and a big goal for this year is to be able to read them in a meaningful way. I'm at the stage at the moment where I can understand enough on each page to follow the basic line of the plot, but there are often whole sentences which I can't get the sense of and it requires such concentration that I can't face more than one chapter at a time. I'd like to be at the stage where the reading experience is less of a chore. Wish me luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4575 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 2 of 522 02 January 2014 at 10:37pm | IP Logged |
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My main aim for the first week of 2014 is revision.
Today I took the plunge and logged into my much-neglected Memrise account. It was slightly worse than I expected; 887 Croatian plants requiring watering. Oops! I find it a lot easier to concentrate on Memrise using the app on my phone rather than on the computer, so I spent my commuting time today trying to clear the backlog. As of this evening, I've managed to get it down to 242 ready for watering, so progress has been made but there is still a way to go...! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4575 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 3 of 522 03 January 2014 at 11:02pm | IP Logged |
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I hit Memrise zero today, which was a relief! I may have become a bit over-excited and
started a couple of new courses on there, though. One called "20 fruits", which is by definition quite short but which I thought would be useful because my knowledge of Croatian fruit was previously limited to 'jabuka' (apple). When I was in Zagreb before Christmas, it would have been nice to extend the range of fruit juice I was able to order ;) The second one I've started is called 'Croaticum A1+' and although I'm only partway through it, it seems like one of the better Croatian courses I've tried on Memrise. There's a really fun level on animals, with phrases like 'spor kao puž' (slow as a snail) and 'hrabar kao lav' (courageous as a lion), which I enjoyed. Not sure I understood 'mokar kao miš' (wet like a mouse), though. Are Croatian mice renowned for being wet? Or is this some general property of mice which has passed me by? There's only so much Memrise a person can take, so during my morning commute I began rereading 'Teach Yourself Croatian'. I got as far as chapter seven before I got to work. Going for a walk at lunchtime, I intended to listen to some of the accompanying audio but my iPod has inexplicably deleted both this and my Pimsleur audio... I guess that shows how long since it is since I've last listened to them. I had to listen the audio from the Hippocrene 'Beginners Croatian' instead. I normally prefer not to do that in public because I like to repeat the dialogue aloud. I can normally get away with that if I go for a walk around my (reasonably quiet) home town, but in a busy city centre I was in danger of being thought mad. Hoping to make lots more progress tomorrow now it's the weekend. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4575 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 4 of 522 04 January 2014 at 11:06pm | IP Logged |
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Didn't get quite as much done today as I had hoped - eek! I had to spend most of the morning cleaning the house and taking down the Christmas decorations, so I
took the opportunity to listen to some Hladno Pivo, who are fast becoming one of my favourite bands of all time. I'm not sure listening to Croatian music really helps me learn anything, but I enjoy picking out the phrases I can understand and looking up the lyrics later online. Tekstovi.net seems to be a good website for finding BCMS song lyrics, and sometimes if I'm too lazy to try translating them myself, there are English translations (of sorts!) at lyricstranslate.com. If anyone has any recommendations of good BCMS music to listen too, they would be appreciated :) The only other music I've tried listening to so far is Severina, but I'm really not a fan. Cleaning done, I had to walk into town for something, so listened to the dialogues from the first four lessons of the Hippocrene book. The roads around my hometown are fairly quiet, so I didn't get too many funny looks when I was repeating the dialogue under my breath. When I got home I had time to do some proper studying, so started working through the exercises from chapter 9 of 'Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian - A Textbook'. I had this for my birthday in November and am really enjoying it so far. I really like the fact that the answers to the exercises are online, so I can work through them with pen and paper and check them next time I come online, removing any temptation to look at them as I go along. It's also fascinating to see the differences/similarities between Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian. Today I learned that in Croatian, the word 'Slavic' is translated as 'slavenski', while in Serbian it is 'slovenski', but in Croatian 'slovenski' means 'Slovenian'; in Serbian, 'Slovenian' is 'slovenački'. Confusing or what?! I've rounded off the day with a bit more Memrise; 142 plants needing watering today and have done some new planting on the Croaticum course. Edited by Radioclare on 04 January 2014 at 11:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7148 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 522 05 January 2014 at 5:33pm | IP Logged |
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It's good to see that you're getting into the thick of things with BCMS/SC.
Unfortunately I have nothing to offer musically in BCMS/SC apart from Goran Bregović. I went to one of his concerts; it was quite amusing since I had never before been in a sea of ex-Yugos. As for comparisons, I find them most interesting. While I was brushing up on my BCMS/SC last year for a trip to Serbia, I did some comparative analysis with the dialogues in Hippocrene's "Beginner's Croatian" and "Beginner's Serbian", and also analyzed a monograph describing the differences within BCMS/SC as a precursor to designing neurolinguistic tools and machine translation software for these "languages". If you're interested, I noted all of my observations and findings in my log, and broke them down by chapter in Hippocrene's textbooks, and/or sections of that monograph. In the BCMS/SC profile on this site, there are links to every post with this analysis (scroll down to "Links and Sources" in the profile, and look under the headings "Juxtaposed analysis of divergent words and phrases in dialogues and narratives from “Beginner’s Croatian” and “Beginner’s Serbian” arranged sequentially by chapter" and "Analysis and critique of differences presented in the monograph". Sretno! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4575 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 6 of 522 05 January 2014 at 7:47pm | IP Logged |
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Hvala lijepa, Chung!
Your comparisons between 'Beginner's Croatian' and 'Beginner's Serbian' look fascinating. At one point I had been contemplating buying 'Beginner's Serbian' to get a better understanding of the differences, but it looks like I could go through my copy of 'Beginner's Croatian' and study your notes instead. The analysis of the monograph also looks very interesting. I have bookmarked it all to come back to and read in detail later. I got a copy of Robert Greenberg's 'Language and Identity in the Balkans' for Christmas so am excited to start reading that too. I will investigate Goran Bregović! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4575 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 7 of 522 05 January 2014 at 8:01pm | IP Logged |
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I managed to sort out the missing audio on my iPod last night, so when I walked to church today I listened to the first three lessons from 'Teach Yourself
Croatian' and walking back I listened to the first Pimsleur lesson. I'm not a big fan of Pimsleur, but I thought it would be good to have some variety. I am now 100% confident in asking someone if they are an American ;) When I got home I had to do my homework for the Croatian class I attend on Monday evenings. I have been procrastinating this since before Christmas because I think the tasks we've been set to do are pointless and aren't going to teach us anything. There were three parts to the homework, one for each week of the Christmas holiday. Task one was to write out a three-course menu in Croatian for each day of the week. Potentially this may have been a relevant homework task if we had been learning food vocabulary, but unless I dropped off during one of the lessons, I don't think we are. I didn't spend much time on this and concentrated on food I ate when I was in Zagreb before Christmas. Task two was to read a photocopied page of horoscopes from a Serbian magazine and underline usage of the imperative. This was vaguely relevant as we have been practising the imperative in class, but the language used in the text is very colloquial and the sentence constructions are far more complicated than most people in the class are going to be able to understand. (It's an entry-level class, the objectives of which seem to be to learn to say your name and order a coffee). I dutifully underlined some imperatives and thought I might learn something from translating the horoscopes into English, but after two star signs I lost the will to live. I don't have much time for horoscopes in any language! Task three was to learn the words to Tiha noć (Silent Night) and be prepared to sing it in class tomorrow. I decided to rebel and not complete this part of the homework as I can't sing in any language. Bah, humbug! To cheer myself up, I went to Youtube and watched an episode of Thomas the Tank Engine in Croatian (search for 'tomica i prijatelji hrvatski' and you'll find lots of episodes). I loved Thomas when I was a child and the Croatian version is really cool. Linguistically it is just about my level and the guy doing the voiceover speaks really clearly. I can't understand every word but I can more-or-less get the gist of every sentence, so it gives a nice sense of achievement. It's also good as practice for recognising different verbs in the past tense. I've tried a few other children's programmes in Croatian (Vatrogasac Sam, Poštar Pat) but this is definitely my favourite :) In an attempt to raise the intellectual tone of the day, I then went to the hrvatski page of Deutsche Welle and watched this week's 'EuroBox' programme. They produce a 30-minute European news programme in Croatian each week and I find it really interesting. The language is definitely more challenging than Thomas the Tank, so I'm more at the stage of picking out phrases I understand than following each sentence, but I think it's a good way to get used to hearing spoken Croatian and the journalists do speak reasonably clearly. This week the topics covered included why Latvians aren't too happy about joining the Euro, ideas for promoting safer driving in Italy, Germany's first female defence minister and alternative uses for church buildings in the Netherlands. Figuring I had probably had enough audio for one day(!), I wrote a short text about my recent visit to Ljubljana over at Lang-8. It's not very inspiring, but you can find it here. I wrote it without a dictionary because I wasn't trying to learn new words, but rather practise expressing myself with the words I already have. Someone has kindly corrected it for me already and I have learnt a couple of useful things, particularly about commas (which I know I get wrong even in English!). I also mistakenly used the verb 'živjeti' in the context of staying in a hotel, probably subconsciously influenced by Esperanto, where I would probably say 'loĝi en hotelo' rather than 'resti en hotelo'. It's good to know that Croatian is more similar to English in this respect. I didn't know the correct past participle of 'užívati' (to enjoy) and incorrectly guessed, so that was corrected too. Other than that, I had a couple of stupid mistakes, like in the penultimate sentence I inexplicably used the accusative when I knew full well that it should have been locative. Grrr! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4575 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 8 of 522 06 January 2014 at 11:39pm | IP Logged |
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I devoted my time on the train into work this morning to Memrise. As well as watering
about a hundred of my existing plants, I was able to finish planting the Croaticum course. It looks like there may be more levels added to this in future, but I have planted the ones that are there for the time being. The final level was particularly useful because it contained phrases with ‘u’ and with ‘na’, eg. ‘ici na kavu’, ‘ici u crkvu’ etc. It’s really useful to have examples of which nouns take which preposition. I also had time to reread chapter 8 of ‘Teach Yourself Croatian’, which focuses on vocabulary relating to the home. I think I’m okay with the names for rooms of the house and furniture now, but I probably need some practice on kitchen implements. At lunch time I managed to sneak out of the office and go for a walk, while listening to Pimsleur lesson 2. On Monday evenings I go to a Croatian class at a local college. I enrolled in the full knowledge that it would be a course for beginners – and I may have lied slightly and given the impression that I was a complete beginner – but it has been far, far more basic than I was expecting. My motivation for joining was that I am quite introverted and speaking is always my weakest language skill by far, so I wanted to get some practice in speaking Croatian beyond the limited conversations of buying tickets, checking into apartments etc which I can have on holiday. I also thought that, although it is a beginner’s course, given that the lessons are 90 minutes every Monday of the academic year, by the time it got to Christmas we might have covered the stuff I already know and be able to deal with some more complex material. They don’t run a more advanced course due to lack of demand – and in fact there are very few places in the UK where you can attend any sort of lessons in Croatian at all – so I decided it was worth giving it a go. With the benefit of hindsight, it was a big mistake. Yes, it is nice to practise speaking aloud, but overall it is an extremely frustrating experience and the standard of the teaching is not very high. The assumption seems to be that at this initial level we will not be capable of learning any grammar at all, and so if you ask a question which touches on grammar the teacher will dismiss you saying, “Oh, that would be a higher level”. The result is that those members of the class who are using these lessons as their sole/primary source of Croatian-learning are extremely confused. A few weeks ago we were supposed to write some simple sentences about ourselves, for example, and one woman wanted to say that she had a dog. The teacher explained to her that the relevant phrase was “Imam psa”. Fine, but as we’re not learning grammar there was no mention of the accusative case. The next week, the teacher asks the class what the word for dog is. “Psa”, the student answers promptly. “No”, says the teacher, “the word for dog is pas.” Cue very confused student. “But… last week you told us it was psa!”. Dismissive teacher. “This week it is pas. Don’t worry about it, that would be a higher level”. I don’t think that this style of teaching, which makes Croatian appear like some mystical language whose words change at random on a weekly basis, is very helpful :( Anyhow, in today's lesson we were supposed to be learning the names of countries and languages. This might have been a useful exercise if the teacher had given some thought in advance to which languages are spoken in which countries. She lost me at the point at which she insisted that French is spoken in Austria. Sigh. Rant over. Hopefully will learn more tomorrow. Edited by Radioclare on 06 January 2014 at 11:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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