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 73 of 522 12 February 2014 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
This isn't shaping up to be a very good week as I have just finished work at 23.59.
I managed to bring my Hippocrene book away with me this week though and I while I was
having dinner in the hotel this evening, I revised chapter 4 and did the exercises
(mainly practising accusative case endings) in my head.
I do feel like I've not been making very structured progress over the past week or so,
but this week and next week are the worst two weeks of the year for me work-wise, so
consoling myself that I will have more free time in the near future.
I am keeping up with Memrise, although was a bit horrified to find 149 plants requiring
watering this evening. I think I need to take Expugnator's advice and delete some of
the decks I'm happy with now.
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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 74 of 522 13 February 2014 at 1:02am | IP Logged |
I felt like watching some more children's television tonight, but unfortunately the
internet connection in my hotel isn't fast enough to load Youtube.
I was forced to do something more intellectual instead, so worked my way through chapter
5 of 'Beginner's Croatian'. This mainly deals with the genitive, although for me the most
useful bit was probably the summary of conjunctions and which ones require a comma before
them. Commas are a definite weak point for me.
I said the answers to the exercises out loud to myself rather than writing them down and
was pleased when I read the model answers at the back of the book that I hadn't made too
many mistakes. The main thing that I got stuck on was the genitive plural of 'zadatak'.
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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 75 of 522 14 February 2014 at 1:11am | IP Logged |
When I went for dinner in the hotel this evening I took my Kindle with me and read through Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 of Colloquial Croatian. They mainly
dealt with accusative, genitive and dative/locative case endings for nouns.
I also (slowly!) read an article about recognition of the Macedonian
church on Deutsche Welle.
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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 76 of 522 16 February 2014 at 12:11am | IP Logged |
I didn't update my log on Friday because the day was a bit of a failure and I didn't do
anything Croatian-wise except 30 minutes of Memrise on the train home.
As penance, this evening I have finished adding the vocabulary from 'Teach Yourself
Croatian' to Memrise. I started this weeks ago, got as far as G and somehow lost
motivation. (I have been inputting the words alphabetically based on the Croatian-
English wordlist at the back of the book, creating a level per letter). Tonight I went
from G all the way to Ž and the course now contains over 900 words :) What did I
learn? Mainly that there are far too many words beginning with 'P' in the Croatian
language. And that the Croatian for breadcrumbs is 'mrvice'.
For Valentine's Day yesterday my other half bought me some books, one of which is
called 'Through Another Europe: An Anthology of Travel Writing on the Balkans'. As the
name suggests, it's a collection of travel writing about the Balkan countries,
organised chronologically from the seventeenth century up to the present day. I haven't
got very far with it yet but it looks like it is going to be fascinating, and will last
me longer than flowers ;)
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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 77 of 522 16 February 2014 at 11:12pm | IP Logged |
This afternoon my other half took me to the pub and I brought my 'Beginners' Croatian'
with me. I read through Chapter 6 and wrote out the exercises. I think that if you picked
up my copy of the book you would find that it opens automatically at Chapter 6 because
it's the chapter on numbers and I have probably read it a hundred times already in
desperate attempts to understand them, but it never hurts to have a refresh. If I can
answer the exercises after a glass of wine then I think I am getting somewhere :)
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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 78 of 522 18 February 2014 at 12:03am | IP Logged |
I didn't have time to learn much Croatian today. I also didn't have time to eat dinner,
so don't feel too bad about it. I am really looking forward to this week being over!
All I have done is stay on top of Memrise, which produced 211 plants for watering this
evening just to spite me. Most of them were words from the Croaticum course which I
haven't practised for quite a long time, so it was worth doing. The others were from the
"20 fruits" course I planted earlier in January. I am struggling on that one with the
difference between 'trešnja' and 'višnja' as I can't tell them apart even when I tried
looking at pictures on Google image search. I guess I don't eat enough fruit ;)
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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 79 of 522 20 February 2014 at 12:39am | IP Logged |
Yesterday was a bit of write-off. I finished started work at 07.00, finished at 01.30
today, and started again this morning at 06.30.
This evening has been a bit better though. I had another 255 plants waiting for
watering on Memrise; again, mainly from the Croaticum course.
I have managed to find a spare ten minutes to watch another episode of 'Tomica i
prijatelji'. This one was called 'Dobro kao Gordan' and was about how Emily was given
the job of pulling Gordan's express train one day when he was given a different task.
In an attempt to drive as fast as possible and match his record for speed, she runs out
of water and eventually grinds to a halt just short of her destination. The moral of
the story was to patient, and luckily patience is one of the words I learned on Memrise
recently so I was able to recognise it and understand :)
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Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6589 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish
| Message 80 of 522 20 February 2014 at 5:51am | IP Logged |
As for 'trešnja' and 'višnja', well, Russian has both too. If I were speaking to an English speaker, I'd use cherry for both. Apparently the first kind is "sweet cherry" and the second sour/tart cherry.
Basically at least Russian has no generic word for cherry regardless of the kind, and I'm under the impression that this applies to most Slavic languages. And because sour/tart has a negative connotation in English, nobody says "with a sour cherry on top" :) Even if technically it's sour cherries, since (according to wiki etc) they are more resistant both to the climate and to handling/processing. :)
So the metaphoric cherry is generally the sour kind, because the roots are simply different and to us there's no connotation of sour here. I'm pretty sure I've seen višnja used metaphorically too in Croatian. The tree name corresponds to the kind of fruit/berries that grow on it, but the wood seemingly tends to be one or the other - in Russian it's the sour kind, as it's more common, but since in Bulgarian the word for sweet cherry is used for the wood, I'm not sure which one Croatian uses here.
And by the way this is the first time I sorted this out in my head properly.
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