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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 177 of 522 16 May 2014 at 11:02pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks Serpent :) I had never thought of the link with 'celo' in Esperanto!
I have survived my away day but it was pretty much as horrific as I thought. I'd been hoping I'd at least be able to get some reading done on the coach to the venue, but all the seats were arranged in groups of four so that you had to sit facing colleagues and make polite conversation for two hours. When we arrived we didn't even have hotel rooms to ourselves so there was virtually no space to get away from people. On Thursday evening there was a formal dinner with a free bar until 2am and whilst I like a glass of wine as much as the next person, people were getting seriously stupidly drunk so I managed to sneak away before the end and get a few more pages of 'Vrata Rima' in before I went to bed. Today was taken up with team-building activities but on the way home I did some more pages and learned a few more words: dug (debt) smiješak (smile) zajam (loan) I'd like to say that I'm going to make lots more progress at the weekend but I'm going to London with some of my partner's family, so in reality I probably won't :( 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 178 of 522 18 May 2014 at 9:52pm | IP Logged |
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The weekend actually went better than I thought in terms of finding time for Croatian.
Our train on Saturday wasn't until midday, so I had time to watch another episode of 'Bitange i Princeze' before I needed to leave the house. I got a seat on my own on the train and so was able to continue reading 'Vrata Rima' without appearing rude. I probably did appear rude about 10pm on Saturday evening when instead of sitting and drinking with everyone else I went to bed on my own with a book, but it was a long day and I was past caring by that point! In total I managed to read 42 pages on Saturday and on the slow train back home this evening I read another 41. There are still a lot of words which I do not understand but I'm not having any problems following the story. On the one hand it makes me nervous that there are still so many words that I can't even hazard a guess at, but on the other hand if I stretch my memory I can remember when reading felt like this in German. Back then it didn't bother me at all because I never doubted for a minute that I would be able to speak fluent German one day (ah, the innocence of youth!) and so I just carried on reading my way through the entire German- language collection of the libraries in my home town and I guess by the end of it I was able to speak fluent German. But often I feel very doubtful that I will ever achieve this with Croatian. Whether it's because I'm older and wiser, because Croatian is inherently more 'difficult' or just because it's so much harder to achieve anything at all when work takes at least 12 hours out of every weekday, I don't know. I made the mistake of looking at the Super Challenge stats this evening (I think I might ban myself from doing that) and the only conclusion I was able to draw was that I should give up and learn French or Spanish instead! Really, either of those languages would be so much more sensible. I'm going to Spain in five weeks and spending a fortnight travelling from Bilbao to Seville. And I have an entire shelf of French materials, including some parallel texts, representing so many broken promises to my boyfriend (who used to live in France, has lots of French friends etc) that I will master French before we go there again. But unfortunately all I want to do is learn Croatian! Edited by Radioclare on 18 May 2014 at 10:06pm 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 179 of 522 19 May 2014 at 10:45pm | IP Logged |
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After I updated my log yesterday evening I watched another two episodes of 'Bitange i
Princeze' - episodes 10 and 11 from series 1. I can't help think that my time would be more productively spent studying my textbook, but I think this is partly because I'm quite impatient and I can see instant progress when I learn something in a textbook compared to very marginal progress from watching trashy TV shows. Today was a momentous day because I finally finished reading 'Vrata Rima'. It feels like it has been rather a marathon! Finishing it means that I have now read 12.2 'books' for the Super Challenge, although that is only my second actual book. The problem I have now is that it is part of a series of which I have books 3 and 4 in Croatian but not book 2. So I need to read the second book speedily in English before moving on to the third book in Croatian. That gave me the dilemma of what to read next in Croatian. I have got a few pdfs of books on my Kindle so this evening on the train home I had a flick through them and decided to start with 'Sumrak', which is the Croatian translation of 'Twilight'. I've chosen it because I think it is a book for teenagers and therefore I am hoping the language will be simpler than 'Vrata Rima'. I don't know a lot about it, except that it was extremely popular a few years ago - which prejudices me to think I will hate it - and that it involves vampires. I'm hoping it won't be as scary as Dracula or I will probably have nightmares! Anyway, I was a bit surprised when I opened it to see that the print is quite large and there are probably only 250 words to a page (compared to about 400 words to a page in 'Vrata Rima'). My pdf has 481 pages so I thought perhaps it had been artificially stretched out, but when I looked it up on Amazon the paperback has 464 pages. I'm not sure whether the spacing means I ought to count each page as half a page for the challenge. Or whether I should count them all on the grounds that words to a page will always vary and it will even out over the duration of the challenge. I'm sure there is some guidance on this in one of the SC threads; I need to go back and read them! I didn't start reading it properly this evening anyway, but spent some time flicking through 'Vrata Rima' and making a list of words which I was too lazy to look up at the time but which I would like to know the meaning of. I looked up about 50 in the end so I feel like I've learned quite a lot :) 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 180 of 522 20 May 2014 at 11:08pm | IP Logged |
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I started reading 'Sumrak' on the train to work this morning. I went through some of the SC threads again last night and found
a few posts where people seemed to think it was okay to count 250 words as a page when reading e-books, so I'm going to count every page I read for the time being and reassess at a later date if I feel like I've counted too many. Since my last post I have watched three more episodes of 'Bitange i Princeze'. I watched episode 12 from series 1 last night after I posted, and then I watched episode 13 (which is the final episode in the first series) this evening. I was intending to leave it at that but it felt like rather a cliff-hanger ending so - being impatient - I immediately watched episode 1 of series 2 as well. I am slightly concerned that I am getting hooked on television! I am now on 6.9 films and 12.8 books, so it's clear that I'm finding the film part of the challenge a lot more difficult than the reading. I have been disappointed by how little coverage there has been on the BBC of the dreadful floods in the Balkans. However I did have an email today from the British Croatian society with details of how to donate to Caritas in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 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 181 of 522 21 May 2014 at 11:05pm | IP Logged |
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Today has been dominated by work, and so I haven't watched any more Croatian video.
I've been reading 'Sumrak' on the train though and have managed 29 pages today. Considering I'm already on page 56, it's remarkable how little has happened in this book. It feels a bit like '50 Shades of Grey' without the exciting bits. Perhaps I should try to get a copy of '50 Shades of Grey' in Croatian. I would definitely learn some new words ;) So far the most exciting thing about 'Sumrak' is trying to word out what language it's supposed to be written in. On the one hand I have come across some words like 'glazba' which seem quite "Croatian" but on the other hand there are some things which seem more "Serbian" eg. 'ko' and 'niko' rather than 'tko' and 'nitko'. I am guessing it is supposed to be in Croatian because it is ijekavian, but it is interesting to try and spot words which I wouldn't have necessarily expected to see. 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 182 of 522 22 May 2014 at 11:29pm | IP Logged |
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Okay... so this is a bit awkward... but I think I'm getting hooked on 'Sumrak'. In total
I've read 50 pages of it today, of which 20 weren't during my commute but during my actual evening free time when I had proper important things I was supposed to be doing for Esperanto. Oh dear. I watched another episode of 'Bitange i Princeze' tonight. I think my listening abilities must be improving slightly because I'm getting to the point where I'm so into the story that it's annoying me when I can't follow things. 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 183 of 522 23 May 2014 at 10:28pm | IP Logged |
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I read 60 pages of 'Sumrak' today. In my defence, I had a longer than usual commute
because I was going to a town with only one train per hour and I arrived at the station with 55 minutes until the next train home. I learned one new word: vukodlak (werewolf). I am now on 15.5 books and 7.3 films. I really need to watch more films! I'm going to Nottingham tomorrow to see a play in Croatian so I'm quite excited about that :) I'm hoping to have lots of time to read this weekend because our car has broken and so we can't really go anywhere. I need to hide my growing Twilight-addiction from my boyfriend, because I've promised him that when I have spare time I'll read a very intellectual-looking book about the history of Spain that he's bought prior to us going on holiday! 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 184 of 522 24 May 2014 at 10:07pm | IP Logged |
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I read another 60 pages of 'Sumrak' today during the time I spent travelling to and
from Nottingham on trains. I looked up some of the words I didn't know on Google Translate and have learnt some new vocabulary as follows: far (headlight) tuga (sorrow, grief) lijesa (coffin) zabluda (misconception) dah (breath) This means that reading Twilight is extremely educational and I should continue doing it during all waking hours. It was a horribly rainy day today - it has literally poured all day long - and so I got absolutely soaked going to Nottingham. But on the upside, I didn't have a waterproof bag big enough to take the history of Spain with me ;) The play, which was an interpretation of Chekov's 'The Seagull', was a bit surreal. I found I could understand some of the characters better than others; mainly the men better than the women, because they had clearer/louder voices. I wouldn't say I understood enough to have followed the play without the English surtitles. But I understood enough to be able to tell when the surtitles were out of sync with what was being said on stage and to get by when there was some sort of technical fault in the middle and the surtitles broke. Also there was some swearing which they didn't translate :D All in all it has been a good day. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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