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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 113 of 522 25 March 2014 at 11:43pm | IP Logged |
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I got a lift to work this morning which was lovely, but meant I didn't get to study any
Croatian. This evening I went for a walk and started listening to the audio from the BCS textbook. This has definitely been an under-used resource for me; I got the book and the audio at Christmas, but I don't think I had listened past lesson 2 until today. I started at the beginning while I was walking and got as far as 9A1, which is only a bit behind where I am up to with the book. I really enjoyed it and could definitely feel the benefit of having "Memrise'd" all the vocab from those lessons :) 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 114 of 522 27 March 2014 at 11:46pm | IP Logged |
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Most of my language time over the past few days has been taken up with Memrise. I had a
lot of watering to do after planting so much of the TYC vocab on Monday. This evening I also finished planting the vocab from lesson 11 of the BCS textbook. There were some useful words in this, including lots of names of professions. A Ukrainian friend linked to a newspaper article written in Serbian on Facebook today, so I decided to try to read it. So far I've managed about two paragraphs ;) I could perhaps have chosen a simpler text to practise on, but my reading speed in Cyrillic is something a small child would be ashamed of. I can recognise all the letters, even in italics (although seriously, why is it necessary to write in italics so often?!), but I can't recognise a word of more than three letters without sounding it out like a five- year-old. I need to practise this more before I go to Serbia and Macedonia later in the year. The rest of my evenings have been spent on Esperanto admin. I must have spent over an hour on a single email this evening, only to realise after I'd pressed send that I'd asked someone to "debiti" something when it should have been "debeti". Who said this language was easy?! 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 115 of 522 29 March 2014 at 9:18pm | IP Logged |
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This morning I spent some time working on chapter 11 of the BCS textbook. This covered
passive participles and comparatives of adjectives, neither of which are particular strong points for me, so it was quite a tough one. I made a lot of notes on adjectives but I think I'm veering towards memorising the most important comparatives rather than trying to remember when a letter softens and what its softened version might be. I wrote out the C exercises and did quite well on them, but mainly because they weren't actually testing knowledge of comparatives or participles ;) I was sad today to discover that 'Tomica i prijatelji' has now been removed from Youtube following a copyright claim! I am going to miss using it to re-live my childhood, if not for learning Croatian. 'Poŝtar Pat' still seems to be available and this evening I watched an episode called 'Razigrani ljubimci'. On the reading front I've had a break from Balkan history and am currently about three quarters of the way through Arika Okrent's 'In the land of invented languages'. I didn't read this when it originally came out because I have zero interest in conlangs, but it is actually a really good read. I think the chapters which touch on the Esperanto movement are extremely fair; far more positive than what I would have written the way I feel about it sometimes! I was wading through more Esperanto correspondence earlier and feeling pretty fed up with the whole thing when I came to a message where a colleague had written "Ĉiu en la administra skipo havas siajn fortojn, ankaŭ malfortojn, ĉar ni homas". "Ĉar ni homas" struck me as such a beautiful way of phrasing things that it really cheered me up. Амико миа аускултис миајн плендојн при ла малфацилецо де ла цирила алфабето кај пропонис ке ми џин практику пер цирила транслитерумо де Есперанто. Чу тио боне функциос ау не ми не цертас, сед чиуоказе естас еге амузе џин прови. 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 116 of 522 30 March 2014 at 10:08pm | IP Logged |
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This afternoon I started on chapter 12 from the BCS textbook. I am going to start going through the remaining chapters more slowly and thoroughly
now, because I think they will probably deal with concepts and vocab which I haven't mastered yet. So I took my time with chapter 12, learning the vocab from the A1 dialogue and then copying out the dialogue itself for practice. It was quite an interesting paragraph as it dealt with student accommodation in Croatia. When I was trying to learn the vocab for the section, I was a bit unsure about the word 'cimer/cimerica', the translation of which was given as 'roommate'. I have made a few errors in Croatian in the past from learning an American English translation of a word but attributing a British English meaning to it (because I didn't realise that the word had a different meaning in the USA). An example would be the word 'kolače' which my Hippocrene Croatian book translated as 'sweets'. To me 'sweets' are what (I think!) Americans call 'candy', and so (completely forgetting that I was using an American book) I assumed that that was what 'kolače' meant. It was only when I was physically standing in a bakery in Zadar that I had the revelation that 'kolače' are in fact cakes... Anyway in the case of 'roommate' I was confused because in British English a 'roommate' is someone you share a bedroom with, whereas I'm fairly sure an American Esperantist once explained to me that in the USA, the word 'roommate' can be used to describe what in the UK we would call a 'flatmate'/'housemate', ie. someone with whom you share an apartment/house but having separate bedrooms. When I finished learning the vocab and writing out the A1 exercise though, it seemed to imply that every room had two beds, two desks, two bedside tables etc, so I am going to assume that 'cimer' means roommate in the sense of someone you share a bedroom with. This would fit with my experience of staying in uni accommodation in Hungary and Czech Republic, where rooms have had (at least) two beds. Vocab worries resolved, I flicked to the back of the book where one of the appendices deals with guidelines for Cyrillic handwriting. Because I seem to learn best by writing things out on paper rather than by typing on the computer, I periodically succumb to brief spells of madness when I think that mastering Cyrillic handwriting would be a good idea. This particular session lasted about 30 minutes until one of my cats started chasing the pen across the page and I realised this wasn't making a noticeable difference to the legibility of my characters ;) This evening I tried watching this week's Eurobox on Deutsche Welle, which for some reason I found harder to follow than last week's. There were items on the psychology of President Putin, the failure of diplomacy in the run up to the First World War and young girls forced into marriage in Turkey. My internet gave up about 20 minutes into it, so unfortunately I didn't get to see the end. In other news I have finished (and thoroughly recommend) the Arika Okrent book. Somewhat appropriately on a day in which I read a book on invented languages, I wasted most of the morning discussing a storm in an Esperanto teacup caused by the Cifal (chief) of the Volapük movement. Probably about as far removed from reality as it is possible to get! Edited by Radioclare on 30 March 2014 at 10:09pm 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 117 of 522 31 March 2014 at 10:09pm | IP Logged |
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This evening I continued with chapter 12 of the BCS textbook. I started by copying out
the vocab in section A2, because I haven't got this far in my Memrise course yet and some of it was new to me. New words I learned include: izlog = shop window, display naporan = strenuous pratiti = to follow, to accompany I also learned that televizor is the work for a television set and televizija is what you watch on it. I copied out the text for this section also, which was illustrating the use of present verbal adverbs and group numbers. Then I read through the grammar section and made notes on the rules for group numbers. This is something I normally skip over in any of my textbooks, because I don't see the point of struggling to remember that "when a mixed-gender phrase is the subject, a present tense verb is plural, but a past tense verb is neuter singular" when I could probably get through life never using those words. There was a sentence in the text that I didn't understand actually: "Dvanaest mačaka i jedanaest pasa gledalo ih je iz izloga". What I'm struggling with is the word order. If I had tried to write that sentence I would have put "Dvanaest mačaka i jedanaest pasa ih je gledalo iz izloga". I'm not sure why "gledalo" comes before "ih" so that the clitics look like they are in third place in the sentence. Perhaps there will be a section on word order later in the book. I was home from work quite early for a change so I went for a walk and listened to some more of the BCS audio. I started at 5A1 and got as far as 11A3. In other exciting news I have purchased town plans of Skopje and Belgrade in preparation for my holiday later in the year :) 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 118 of 522 01 April 2014 at 10:09pm | IP Logged |
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This evening has been mostly dominated by watching wrestling (it's Wrestlemania next
week!) so I haven't been doing very serious studying. I have input the vocabulary from chapter 13 and chapter 14 of the BCS textbook into Memrise. It took aaaages! There were 111 words in chapter 13 and 128 in chapter 14. I have planted the vocabulary from chapter 12. This wasn't too difficult as I have learnt about half of it this week already, but there were 99 words so it did take a while. I will have a lot of watering to do tomorrow morning! In other non-Croatian news, today I have been asked to authorise the reprint of 200 CDs which form part of an Esperanto course. We have just reprinted 100 copies of the book, and it's supposed to come with two CDs. I guess I'll authorise it but I do have some misgivings about the future of CDs and how much longer people are going to want to use them for language learning. Surely people would rather have MP3 files to download these days? I don't even have a device which can play CDs, except perhaps my boyfriend's car. I have visions of these sitting on the shelves for years and eventually being cleared out by some future treasurer, the way I've been clearing out the VHS's and cassette tapes! 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 119 of 522 03 April 2014 at 12:01am | IP Logged |
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In a moment of madness I left my mobile phone at home today so I was suffering from real
Memrise-withdrawal on my commute. Lots and lots of watering when I got home this evening! I felt quite lazy tonight so I have been watching videos: - One episode of Poštar Pet (Želježnički inspektor) - One episode of Vatrogasac Sam (Pozar u staglju) - A short video on Deutsche Welle about Romanian engineers to make me feel more intellectual! 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 120 of 522 03 April 2014 at 11:00pm | IP Logged |
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Tonight I continued with chapter 12 of the BCS textbook. I copied out the vocab from
the A3 section and learned two new words: napuniti - to complete (a year) propustiti - to miss (an opportunity) I read through the grammar sections which followed and made notes. These started with a discussion of ordinal numbers and how to express your age and I learned that '87 godina' means '87 years' whereas '87. godina' means 'the 87th year'. The next section was on the future exact, which still confuses me somewhat. I understand what was said in the textbook, as far as it went, but I don't think I would be successful in identifying a sentence where I should use it and do so correctly in my own writing. I'm hoping there will be some exercises at the end of the chapter to practise it. As a final bit of Croatian for the evening, I went to the CroVoc website and played some of the vocabulary games. I could feel a real difference in the number I was getting right compared to last time I played (probably in January) so I think all the words I have been trying to learn via Memrise have been worthwhile. Perhaps my next focus ought to be verb conjugation as I'm still not doing very well at their verb game at all. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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