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Radioclare’s TAC log 2014 (*jäŋe/*ledús)

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Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4581 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 89 of 522
28 February 2014 at 11:27pm | IP Logged 
This morning I read three articles in Croatian on Deutsche Welle. I have figured out that
I can download Google Translate to my phone and use it to look up the odd word that I
don't know.

The first article I read this morning was about a dating website for Catholics in
Germany, the second was about the poor level of music tuition in German schools causing
parents to have to pay for private tuition if they want their children to learn
instruments and the third was about a young German volunteer working with Roma children
in Bosnia.

I learnt quite a few new words from doing this and think perhaps I should record them
somewhere on my phone as I go along and then add them to Memrise for pratice.
1 person has voted this message useful



Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4581 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 90 of 522
02 March 2014 at 12:06am | IP Logged 
Ah, the weekend :)

This morning I revised chapter 9 of 'Beginner's Croatian' and wrote out the exercises.
This is the chapter which deals with the past tense, although some of the exercises are
on pronouns and other subjects which have been covered in previous chapters. Each
chapter ends with a translation exercise and I was pleased that my attempt at this one
resulted in a lot less red pen than my previous effort about six months ago.

This afternoon I went to a coffee shop and started reading one of the books I had for
Christmas: 'Europe's Backyard War: The War in the Balkans' by Mark Almond. I have got
through two chapters so far and am not sure what I think of it. It was first published
in 1994 and so far the author seems to have blamed the entire conflict on the foreign
minister of Luxembourg, which seems a little harsh. I am hoping it will pick up as I
get further into it.

I am thinking I may have to devote a few hours this week to refreshing my Esperanto,
perhaps by reading a novel. I got the Esperanto translation of Bernhard Schlink's 'Der
Vorleser' for my birthday, so that might do. I'm attending an Esperanto discussion
group next weekend and slightly worried that everything I say is going to come out as
Croatian with -o's on the end as I have been focussing on Croatian vocab so much this
year!

I was chatting to my boyfriend about the discussion topics last night, one of which is
going to be 'Prophecies which never came true', and I said that I'd like to make
reference to the millennium bug, but wasn't sure how to express it in Esperanto.

"How would you say 'millennium' in Esperanto," he asked.

Cue blank silence from me.

"Well, how would you say 'century'?"

I paused, then triumphantly came out with "Stoljeće!"

Needless to say, he looked at me as if it had gone mad.

(The Esperanto word for millennium, as I eventually remembered, is 'jarmilo' and the
word for century is 'jarcento', which is why he thought the word for 'century' would
remind me how to express 'millennium'. Vikipedio has helpfully clarified for me that
what I originally wanted to say was 'jarmila cimo'.)


2 persons have voted this message useful



Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4581 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 91 of 522
02 March 2014 at 11:20pm | IP Logged 
This afternoon I revised chapter 10 of 'Beginner's Croatian', which deals with the future
tense and relative pronouns. For some reason I am much worse at the future tense than the
past tense (which makes no sense, because I'm sure that objectively the future tense is
easier!) and relative pronouns are a weak point too, so I didn't do quite as well in the
exercises as yesterday. The translation exercise was really hard and I really struggled
with the sentence "The economy is growing one moment and decreasing the next".

I also did my homework for my Croatian class tomorrow, which involved writing ten
questions to ask the rest of the class based on chapter 11 of TYC (but avoiding the past
tense, obviously!). Can't wait to see what we're going to learn tomorrow ;)


1 person has voted this message useful



Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4581 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 92 of 522
03 March 2014 at 11:36pm | IP Logged 
I started reading 'A handbook of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian' on the train to work
this morning. I think it's probably a bit too intellectual for me to understand, but
I'm trying to make the most of any materials I can find which I can read via my Kindle
on the train. This book is a pdf and although pdfs are a bit hit-and-miss on my Kindle,
it seems to be working okay because the print is quite large.

This evening I went to my Croatian class. It's 90 minutes and we spent the first 60 of
them going over the homework from last lesson. Given that there were only two of us in
the last lesson and as homework we had written 10 sentences each, this shouldn't even
have been possible.

There followed an awkward 30 minutes while the teacher tried to explain why you would
say "Idem u Split" but "Ja sam u Splitu" without mentioning the words 'accusative',
'locative' or 'case'. In the end she came up with the explanation that you add '-u'
when you're staying in a place because that makes the word longer and it takes longer
to stay in a place than it does to travel towards it.

Words fail me.

In other news I have treated myself to a little Macedonian grammar book in German and
am hoping to at least master some basic phrases before September.
1 person has voted this message useful



Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 7154 days ago

4228 posts - 8259 votes 
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 93 of 522
04 March 2014 at 5:49am | IP Logged 
Radioclare wrote:
This evening I went to my Croatian class. It's 90 minutes and we spent the first 60 of them going over the homework from last lesson. Given that there were only two of us in the last lesson and as homework we had written 10 sentences each, this shouldn't even have been possible.

There followed an awkward 30 minutes while the teacher tried to explain why you would say "Idem u Split" but "Ja sam u Splitu" without mentioning the words 'accusative', 'locative' or 'case'. In the end she came up with the explanation that you add '-u' when you're staying in a place because that makes the word longer and it takes longer to stay in a place than it does to travel towards it.


Absolutely atrocious.
3 persons have voted this message useful



Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4581 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 94 of 522
04 March 2014 at 8:26am | IP Logged 
I'd like to know how she thinks this rule applies to feminine nouns!

Edited by Radioclare on 04 March 2014 at 9:56am

1 person has voted this message useful



Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4581 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 95 of 522
04 March 2014 at 11:58pm | IP Logged 
I continued reading 'A handbook of Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian' on the train this
morning. The bit I read yesterday about pronunciation, vowels, accents etc was well
above my head, but today I got to a section about cases and that was much easier to
understand. There were some nice tables and examples illustrating the different case
endings.

I felt surprisingly virtuous at lunch time, so when I went for a walk rather than
listening to Hladno Pivo I subjected myself to Pimsleur lesson 5. This is the exciting
Pimsleur lesson where you get to ask for something to drink.

I actually managed to leave work before it got dark last night, so had some free time
once I got home this evening. I started writing a text in Croatian to be corrected on
Lang-8. I'm sure it's full of errors but it was nice to have chance to do something
like that.

***

Hodiaŭ mi aliĝis al la Brita Kongreso de Esperanto, kiu okazos en Ŝefildo ĉi-paske. Dum
sufiĉe longa tempo mi pripensis ĉu aliĝi aŭ ne. Verdire mi ne volas ĉeesti, ĉar estas
aliaj aferoj kiujn mi ŝatus fari dum pasko. Aliflanke mi ja estas la kasisto de la
brita asocio, kaj do havas devon partopreni la jarkunvenon (kiu okazos je paska
dimanĉo) por klarigi la kontojn al la membroj. Finfine mi do decidis ke tiu devo pli
gravas ol miaj propraj emoj kaj aliĝis. Mi ne dubas ke estos bona semajnfino - certe
estos, aparte pro tio ke Sprachprofi prelegos pri kiel senpage lerni lingvojn - sed mi
ankoraŭ ne ege entuziasmas pri la elektita dato kaj pro tio, ke mi aŭdis onidiron pri
komuna kantado de 'La Espero' je la komenco de la jarkunveno. Tion mi tute rifuzas fari
ĉar por mi Esperanto estas lingvo, ne religio. Estos tamen malfacile, ĉar kutime dum la
jarkunveno la kasisto kaj aliaj kuratoroj devas sidi antaŭe ĉe granda tablo. Se ĉiuj
aliaj do staras kaj ekkantas, estos treege videble al ĉiuj aliaj homoj en la ĉambro ke
mi ne faras. Mi ekpensas ĉu eki ribelon inter la aliaj estraranoj por ke ni ĉiu sidadu
kaj ne kantu ;)
1 person has voted this message useful



Radioclare
Triglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
timeofftakeoff.com
Joined 4581 days ago

689 posts - 1119 votes 
Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto
Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian

 
 Message 96 of 522
05 March 2014 at 11:20pm | IP Logged 
I've managed to resolve the technical problem with my 'Teach Yourself Croatian' course
on Memrise, so it now works properly on my phone app. I was able to finish planting the
letter G today and am now up to 160 items planted.

A very nice person corrected my text on Lang-8 for me today so I have been reviewing my
mistakes. I made some silly ones, but there were some corrections I really learned from
and other places where I wasn't sure whether how I had written something was right and
it didn't get marked as wrong, so I've probably learnt even more from that.

This evening I read a couple of articles on Croatian Deutsche Welle: one about the
Ukrainian crisis and one about Karneval in Germany.

***

Mi bedaŭrinde ne sukcesis trovi sufiĉe da tempo por finlegi romanon en Esperanto ĉi-
semajne, do mi serĉis Esperantaĵojn por legi rete ĉi-vespere. Io instigis min kontroli
la retliston de UEA-membroj. Ho, ve! Mi perdis eble duonhoron per legado de centoj da
nekredeblaj stultaj mesaĝoj, ĝis finfine mi tute seniluziĝis kaj nun emas kabei. Aŭ
almenaŭ ne plu membriĝi en UEA.

Edited by Radioclare on 05 March 2014 at 11:34pm



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