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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 4581 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 161 of 522 01 May 2014 at 12:14am | IP Logged |
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I didn't do too well with Croatian today because I went to a pub quiz this evening. It
was good practice for speaking Esperanto though! (My partner and I always speak in Esperanto during quizzes so that the other teams can't overhear our answers). I decided to register for the 6WC in Macedonian but don't have very high expectations of how far I'm going to get, so I plan to register for the August 6WC in Macedonian as well. I've added it to my profile to remind me I'm supposed to be studying it. So far the only material I have is 'Makedonisch Wort für Wort'. I could only find one Macedonian textbook on Amazon and it's at least £30 so I don't think I could justify buying it until I've actually been to Macedonia and decided whether I want to seriously learn the language or not. I managed to track down the Macedonian Esperanto Association, but I'm undecided about whether to contact them or not. Am looking forward to finally doing some Croatian reading tomorrow. I am going to start with 'Ubojstvo u Orijent Expressu'. 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 162 of 522 01 May 2014 at 11:17pm | IP Logged |
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Today was one of those days which just didn't turn out how I had planned. I was expecting a nice easy day in the office but things went wrong
and I ended up working 12 hours, which meant leaving home at 7.00 and getting back at 20.30. I made at start on reading 'Murder on the Orient Express' in Croatian though while I was on the train. I have chosen this one because I think Agatha Christie's books are generally pretty easy to understand and I have read this one a couple of times in English so I have a vague memory of the plot. So far the reading is going pretty well; I've been rather pleased to recognise some of the words I've been learning on Memrise recently in the text already. I watched 15 minutes of a Postman Pat episode - "Leteci tanjuri" - which made me smile. I also watched my favourite Serbian alphabet song multiple times, but I don't think I can justify counting that as film for the SC. I've made a very shaky start on Macedonian today due to the work-related time constraints. This morning I read the Wikipedia article on Macedonian, which provided some interesting background knowledge. I'm intrigued to read that Macedonian doesn't really have a case system. I've spent some time watching Macedonian alphabet videos on Youtube. This one is my favourite. I want to be able to roll my R's like that child! The only new letters seem to be: Ѓ,Ѕ,Ќ. I think practising the Serbian alphabet has definitely given me a head start. Otherwise all I have done is study the 10 basic phrases on the BBC website. So now I have learned to say: Се викам Клара. Жалам не зборувам македонски. 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 163 of 522 02 May 2014 at 10:30pm | IP Logged |
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Another frustrating day at work, which means I'm going to have to work some of my
weekend too. I've continued reading 'Ubojstvo u Orient Expressu' on the train and am currently on page 78 which means that I have technically read one 'book' for the SC already, despite being quite near the start of this particular book still. Apart from a minor amount of Memrise, that's all I've achieved in Croatian today. As for Macedonian, I've been investigating websites for learning basic Macedonian and the best one I have found so far is macedonianlanguage.org. They have a multimedia alphabet tutorial which I downloaded and have been working my way through this evening. 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 164 of 522 04 May 2014 at 12:57am | IP Logged |
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I watched two episodes of Postman Pat today. The first one - 'Odbjegli zmaj' - was in Croatian and definitely one of the funniest episodes I have
seen. I was initially confused by the word 'zmaj' because I thought it meant 'dragon', but have looked it up in the dictionary it can mean 'kite' as well. Then I found this one to watch in Serbian. I didn't enjoy it as much, but that was more to do with the fact that Postman Pat had been brought into the 21st century with a mobile phone and a laptop than the fact that it was in Serbian. This afternoon I finished working my way through the alphabet tutorial from macedonianlanguage.org. I found it incredibly useful; it walks you through the alphabet one letter at a time, allowing you to click on letters to hear their pronunciation and listen to words containing that letter in different positions. You can also click for a demonstration of how to draw the letter in handwriting, which is definitely something I might come back to watch more seriously in future if I ever find the time to devote to Cyrillic handwriting in general. At the end of each lesson there are a few exercises where a word is written with one letter missing and you can click to hear it and type in the missing letter. At the end of all the lessons there are a couple of longer texts in Macedonian to listen to with translations. This evening I decided that I needed to bite the bullet and try to watch an actual film. I have to say that I found this really difficult even to contemplate, because to me spending 90 minutes watching TV of any sort in any language feels like a waste of time. I can probably count on my fingers the things I have watched over the past five years without simultaneously reading a book/writing emails/surfing the net. However, challenges are supposed to be challenging and so for my evening's entertainment I picked the only Croatian film which I have ever heard of: 'Pjevajte nešto ljubavno'. The only reason I have heard of this film is that I love the Croatian band 'Hladno Pivo', who have a song of the same name and who feature in the film. This song has a special place in my heart because I unleashed it on my dreadful Croatian teacher when she set us a ridiculous homework of finding a song which demonstrated the imperative. This song does indeed demonstrate the imperative. It also demonstrates some slightly rude lyrics which embarrassed the teacher. We haven't had any homework that involves songs since then. Anyhow, watching the film was much better than I expected. When I started I thought it was really going to drag because I could hardly understand a word anyone was saying. For the first 30 minutes or so, which mainly consisted of four band members talking to each other, pretty much the only word I understood with any certainty was 'kurac'. But, as the film progressed there was more of a storyline and once it began to feature some women, I was able to understand whole sentences. After the halfway point, I found I was able to understand scenes where women spoke to women and where men and women spoke to each other, but still not very much where men spoke to men. They just didn't seem to enunciate as clearly/open their mouths at all when they were talking to each other. But the plot was actually quite exciting and in the end I enjoyed myself. Which is good, because I need to watch it another 99 times to finish the Super Challenge ;) Edited by Radioclare on 04 May 2014 at 1:05am 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 165 of 522 04 May 2014 at 8:33pm | IP Logged |
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I think if I learned anything from watching a film yesterday it was that my Croatian
isn't good enough yet to watch real Croatian films. Today I decided to be less ambitious and watched this week's episode of Eurobox on Deutsche Welle. There was an interesting item about the rise of antisemitism in France, a repeat of an article I watched last week on Serbian DW about Bulgarian immigrants to Germany, and a fascinating piece about a museum in Amsterdam which currently has some Crimean treasure on loan and is unsure which country it should now return it to. There were also some less interesting bits about a dolls house and women's summer fashions. I had another look at the HRT 'Emisije na zahtjev' website to see if I could find anything interesting to watch. In the end I watched a programme called 'Jezik za svakoga' which was a little bit above my head but there was an interesting bit about Croatian historically being written in a form of the Cyrillic alphabet. I was really lazy this morning and spent two hours reading on the sofa with my cat, with the result that I got through 108 pages of 'Ubojstvo u Orient Expressu'. I'm quite happy about my progress with this because so far I've understood it well enough not to need to look up the words which I don't understand in the dictionary. I wish I had more Agatha Christie books in Croatian as I think these are ideal for my level at the moment but unfortunately I don't and I think the cost of importing them would be prohibitively expensive. I have been experimenting with courses for learning Macedonian vocabulary on Memrise but haven't succeeded in finding one I like so far so may end up making my own with words from my phrasebook. I'm interested to know how people learning Russian cope with entering Cyrillic letters on Memrise; one of the courses I tried had an on-screen Cyrillic keyboard where you can press the letters to type (slow, but it works) whereas the other one didn't. I found I could either type using an online Cyrillic keyboard and copy and paste the words in (but this was hit and miss, for example bizarrely the course would only accept a Latin 'a' and not a Cyrillic 'a') or I could type combinations of Latin letters (eg. it will accept 'dzh' as a correct answer for 's'). I tried the Memrise app on my phone and that actually worked a lot more smoothly because it presents you with a reduced selection of Cyrillic letters to press in order to type the answers in. 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 166 of 522 07 May 2014 at 1:10am | IP Logged |
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I didn't update my log yesterday evening because we had a little party to watch the Extreme Rules PPV.
I have been busy reading in Croatian though and on Monday afternoon I finished reading 'Ubojstvo u Orient Expressu', my first book of the Super Challenge (although in SC terms it counted as about 4 books). I really enjoyed it and it made me feel like I have achieved something with Croatian after all. I didn't get anywhere with Macedonian on Monday. I got side-tracked reading the Bradt guide to Macedonia which was really interesting but didn't contain much about the language and wasn't really something I could count towards the 6WC. Today I had to get up at an ungodly hour to travel to London and I didn't stop working until 22.50, so I have done as good as nothing with Macedonian today. On the train down this morning I started reading my next book in Croatian: 'Vrata Rima'. It's a translation of a book about the life of Julius Caesar by Conn Iggulden. I've never read anything by Conn Iggulden before but I bought several of his books in a post office in Dubrovnik because they were having a sale and everything was ridiculously cheap. I'm not sure if it was a good decision or not because the 25 pages I read this morning were really, really difficult (twice as difficult as the Agatha Christie I would say). I'm undecided about whether to settle for not understanding everything or whether to go through every page with a dictionary and write down the words I don't know. When I logged onto Youtube tonight it recommended to me that I might want to watch 'Bitange i Princeze'. I gave it a go and it seems to be like a Croatian version of 'Friends'. Unfortunately the internet in the hotel where I am staying this week is really poor so I couldn't watch it on my computer but had to use the Youtube app on my phone instead (which doesn't have very good audio quality) so it was difficult to catch what was being said. It was amusing though and there seem to be a lot of episodes, so I will give it another go another time :) 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 167 of 522 09 May 2014 at 11:32pm | IP Logged |
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To say that the past few days have been a write-off would be an understatement. I've
been working in London since Tuesday and the hours have been crazy. I managed four hours sleep last night and Macedonian has been the last thing on my mind. On Wednesday evening I managed to watch the second episode of 'Bitange i Princeze' before I went to bed. I surprised myself by really enjoying it and laughing out loud in some places, so I will definitely be watching more. This evening on the train home I read a few more pages of 'Vrata Rima'. I'm understanding the sense of it, if not the words. It turns out that my boyfriend has a copy in English so I may steal that and read both copies at the same time as a sort of parallel text. Hopefully the weekend will be more productive. 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 168 of 522 10 May 2014 at 9:41pm | IP Logged |
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Weekends are a beautiful thing :)
I started the day with a much-needed catch-up on my Memrise watering and a couple of games of 'Tko želi biti milijunaš' on my phone, where I got to my best ever score of 250,000 kuna before falling down on a question about (of all things!) Margaret Thatcher. I read 'Vrata Rima' for about an hour in the morning and got through two chapters, which was 29 pages. I have learnt some new words like 'rob' (slave), 'mač' (sword), 'boriti se' (to battle), 'udarac' (blow, kick, punch etc). I had a bit of a nightmare during the week when I had an email from Wizzair saying that my flight back from Belgrade, which I had booked for Sunday 14 September, had been changed to Monday 15 September. I was supposed to be back at work on that Monday so I had to beg for an additional day off. It might not sound like a big issue, but where I work we have to specify the holiday days we want 12 months in advance and go through a complicated approval process, so it was by no means certain that I would be allowed to have it. The only other alternative was to cancel my flight and return on the Friday, but then I would have had to cancel two night's accommodation... In the end I was really lucky that my manager bent the rules for me and said I could book the day off. I now need an extra night of accommodation in Belgrade, however, so this afternoon I emailed the owner of the apartment I have booked in Serbian to ask whether it was possible to extend my reservation. It was a good opportunity to practise writing some Serbian. This evening I watched the third epsiode of 'Bitange i Princeze'. I need to see if I can find a version with subtitles because I am not getting all of the jokes. I'm not going to achieve anything else this evening because I'm too busy watching Eurovision! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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