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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 209 of 522 16 June 2014 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | ||
I think we have established that I am failing the challenge then :D I do have one monolingual textbook that I bought in Zagreb station once to console myself when my train was delayed, but it's written for actual Croatians and I think if I tried to read it at the moment it would blow my mind. ***** I'm in London again today and only briefly on the forum to procrastinate doing more actual work this evening. I read 37 pages of 'Polje Mačeva' on the way down this morning; a few more than I expected because my train was delayed by 20 minutes. After I posted last night I watched another episode of 'Bitange i Princeze' and the final Twilight film - 'Praskozorje 2' - with Croatian subtitles. 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 210 of 522 19 June 2014 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, this week has been a bit of a write off challenge-wise. I've been working crazy
hours in London and averaging four hours sleep per night. My brain feels like jelly! The result was that I did no Croatian at all until I was sitting on the train home this evening and able to read another 40 pages of 'Polje Mačeva'. I didn't even manage to finish work early enough last night to watch Croatia vs Cameroon. Unfortunately I did finish work early enough tonight to watch the England match. The good news is I'm going on holiday in just a little over 24 hours though :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4254 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 211 of 522 21 June 2014 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | ||
Holiday!! Great time to catch up!! I'm hoping to get my film-watching to a higher gear this coming week: heading to Jacksonville, Florida, for husband's work, but being away from home allows ME to watch all my wait-listed French films and not feel guilty that I'm not doing something at home ;-) . I've been forcing myself to sit and concentrate on French TV watching (mainly YouTube); I'm actually finding it relaxing, if I can lose myself in the story, which doesn't always happen when you'd like it to. Where is Twilight when you need it?? Keep up the great work! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 212 of 522 21 June 2014 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds like you're going to get your fourth star soon! I'm concentrating on reading but the book I'm working
on is pretty tough so I'm not going to get through it very quickly. Have a nice weekend ladies! 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 213 of 522 24 June 2014 at 10:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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Looks like both your Super Challenges are going well :)
I have managed to read about 80 pages in Croatian on holiday so far. I have quite a large backlog of English-language books which I need to read (they were birthday/Christmas presents from my other half and he may never ever buy me a book again if I don't make some progress with them!), so I have mainly been focusing on those. Last night I watched the Croatia-Mexico game with Croatian commentary, which was somewhat depressing but did give me another film to count :) Being in Spain is seriously messing with my head, because I keep seeing words which remind me of Croatian but which have absolutely no link whatsoever. This is an actual conversation me and my boyfriend had today: Me: (Sees sign involving the words 'prohibir' and 'pasos') I think that sign says dogs aren't allowed. BF: (Confused silence, then clicks) No, it really doesn't. There is no link between the word for 'dog' in Croatian and Spanish. Me: (Disappointed) What's the Spanish for 'dog' then? BF: Perro Me: Oh cool, it's like the Esperanto word for pen! BF: (Really long confused silence) No it's not. Me: Yes it is! BF: No it's not! Me: Yes it is! ..... ..... ..... BF: FFS, the Esperanto word for 'pen' is 'skribilo'! Me: (Embarrassed silence) Oh. I guess I was thinking of the Croatian word 'pero'. What I'm taking away from this is that I can't understand a single word of Spanish. In fact it took me approximately one day to realise that most of the signs in Bilbao are bilingual (Spanish/Basque) because the Basque didn't make appreciably less sense to me than the Spanish. I listened to the news in Spanish on Sunday and I understood one word: Wimbledon ;) In a strange way this pleases me, because I can remember after my first year of learning Croatian almost being in tears when I listened to a news broadcast in French and had to face up the realisation that I could understand it probably ten times better than a similar broadcast in Croatian, despite the fact that I had devoted so much time to Croatian and precisely zero to French. In other news, I put some photos of Bilbao on Facebook and half the Esperantists in Spain noticed and now I think we are going to have to sneak into Madrid in disguise to avoid a welcoming party... No, I'm (almost!) joking, but we have been invited to a couple of renkontiĝoj and it sounds like we will have the opportunity to meet some really interesting people (including a famous writer and someone who I have chatted to for years on Twitter but never seen in real life). I had intended this to be an Esperanto-free holiday, but I guess the nicest thing about the language is the ability to find friendly faces all over the world. Edited by Radioclare on 24 June 2014 at 10:19pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4254 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 214 of 522 25 June 2014 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | ||
This reminds me of a story I've probably told before on HTLAL, about language interference: I was in my second or third year of university, had been studying Italian for over eight years, French for two or three, and decided to add Spanish to the mix - unfortunately, it was an 8 am class, and I was going to bed much too late in those hectic days. You can guess the rest: the professor would ask me a question in Spanish, I would answer in either French or Italian (or some combination thereof), and, the kicker, he would answer me back in whatever language I had used! I can just picture the look on my face...I was thoroughly confused, and gave up Spanish after that one year; my brain couldn't handle the intermingling of all those Romance languages. Should have given German a shot instead... But sounds like you're having fun, and meeting all sorts of interesting people, which is really why we do this, isn't it? 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 215 of 522 28 June 2014 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm glad it's not just me who gets confused :D Croatian and Esperanto aren't really
similar languages at all, but both do have a lot of words which end in -a and -o and I think that's one of the main contributing factors to my confusion. **** It's not quite the end of June, but this is my update for the second month of the Super Challenge... I have read four more books in Croatian, which brings my total of books read up to eight: 5. Pomrčina 6. Praskozorje 7. Polje Mačeva 8. 100 godina hrvatske književnosti na esperantu I'm guessing number 8 is rather a niche interest ;) In total these eight books give me 65.3 'books'. The film part of the challenge is still going shockingly for me, but this is hopefully mainly as a result of circumstances, which mean I was working long hours in London for two weeks of June and am now on holiday in Spain. I'm going to be at home for the whole of July and August, so will hopefully get a lot more done. During June I watched four of the Twilight films with Croatian subtitles, 4 episodes of the sit-com 'Bitange i Princeze' and one football match with Croatian commentary. I feel like the speed I am reading Croatian at is increasingly slightly. I'm not sure whether I feel like I'm understanding more or not, as the book I spent most of the month reading was a lot more difficult that 'Twilight'. 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 216 of 522 01 July 2014 at 7:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I haven't done any Croatian for the past few days because I'm still on holiday in Spain. I have got another Croatian novel with me, but it's the fourth in the Julius Caesar series I've been reading and I really felt like I needed a break from the Roman empire.
I thought I would update my log anyway to say something positive about Esperanto, because I am conscious of the fact that if I mention it here it's normally to say something negative. That's mainly because I do a lot of unpaid voluntary work for Esperanto associations in my (not so) spare time and sometimes the frustrations I have to deal with as part of this work make me completely disillusioned about Esperanto in general. My relationship with Esperanto is at best an uneasy one, as illustrated by my Twitter bio which - only half-jokingly - says "Mi neniam intencis paroli Esperanton" (I never intended to speak Esperanto). However, over the past few days in Madrid I have had a couple of truly positive experiences as a result of Esperanto, so I felt like I ought to share that here in order to redress the balance a little. I had absolutely no intention of doing anything related to Esperanto on this holiday. However, when I posted some photos of Bilbao on Facebook last week Tonjo noticed and we had a conversation which resulted in us meeting up at the headquarters of the Hispana Esperanto-Federacio in Madrid on Sunday. Tonjo is the president of the Spanish association and someone I have spoken to on Twitter since 2008 but never had the opportunity to meet before. It was nice to hear more about the Spanish association (and know that they face many of the same problems and frustrations that we do in the UK) and also really cool to finally meet Tonjo. As a result of the original conversation on Facebook, another Esperantist Jorge and his wife took us out for a lovely meal in Madrid on Saturday evening and it was fantastic to have the opportunity to experience the city with locals. We definitely tried food and drink which we wouldn't have even considered ordering if we were on our own (due to our limited knowledge of Spanish language and culture) and we had really great fun. So now I feel suddenly more positive about Esperanto and I am thinking perhaps I will contact the Skopje Esperanto Club when I am in Macedonia after all. Madrid is a beautiful city (and brings me up to 22 on my quest to visit all the European capitals - yay!) and has some really good bookshops. I went into a branch of the French chain FNAC on Monday and it really brought home to me how poor our bookshops in the UK really are. There was so much foreign-language literature in Madrid that it took my breath away. As well as the expected shelves of English books there were several floor-to-ceiling shelving units of French, one floor-to-ceiling shelving unit of German, about half that amount of Italian and two shelves of Russian. Doing a Super Challenge in any of those languages from Madrid would be a dream! My partner had to drag me out of the shop before I spent our holiday budget on a collection of Boris Akunin books in Russian; I am a massive fan and it would definitely be a dream for me to be able to read his books in Russian one day, but given that my Russian is nowhere near that level at present it would have been rather extravagant. Hopefully one day!! Edited by Radioclare on 01 July 2014 at 11:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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