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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 321 of 522 17 September 2014 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Wow, that sounds awful! I know you sometimes can't expect too much when you travel in this region, but I think Serbian trains are definitely below the Balkan average. I have experienced regional trains in Croatia and Montenegro and whilst they wouldn't win any prizes, there weren't any serious problems beyond general slow bumpiness. I once read in a guidebook that Latvia has the worst trains in Europe, but I don't think the person who wrote that had been to Serbia! When I went to Latvia last year the trains were crowded, but relatively clean.
The train I travelled on from Belgrade to Novi Sad had graffiti dating back to the 1980s so I think you are right and they are genuinely using the same carriages from decades ago. I read that they had had a big loan from the European Bank to invest in railway infrastructure, but that it had all been invested in freight traffic rather than passenger routes. A friend told me I should have travelled on one of the faster trains going from Belgrade to Hungary which apparently stop in Novi Sad, and that this might have been better quality than the regional train. But next time I think I will just take the bus instead! 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 322 of 522 18 September 2014 at 1:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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I emailed my Serbian friend last night to thank her for the book. If I don't hear back then I guess I have to take the hint and not try to get in touch again. I really need to find a way of adopting some native speakers, because I get bored writing to myself.
Still persevering with 50 Shades audiobook. I might have to quit. Sitting on the train reading the book at 7am felt fine, but sitting on the train at that time of the morning listening to someone read a sex scene out loud in Serbian just feels plain weird. I logged into my Memrise app on my phone and you don't even want to know how many unwatered plants I now have. I'm hoping to get into the habit of watering again and also restart some proper grammar study at the weekend. I can't remember if I already said this but I have massive book envy at the moment because my other half just purchased a book of Italian grammar drills. I don't want to learn Italian but I would love to have a book like that for Croatian! All kinds of Esperanto problems are draining my time at the moment. Sometimes I dream of giving it all up, but it would be hard to do with a clear conscience when I know there is nobody to take my place. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5234 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 323 of 522 18 September 2014 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | ||
If that is the case, then you should consider "boxing off" Esperanto so you dedicate only X amount of hours per week to it. Anything above that amount must be Delegated, Deleted, or Deferred. The Esperanto language has been around for a couple years right? I'm sure it will get along just fine even if you cut back your hours by 50-60%. :) Edited by rdearman on 18 September 2014 at 2:10pm 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 324 of 522 18 September 2014 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | ||
You sound like a GTD fan :) You are, of course, completely right, and I've been trying and failing to limit my time for quite a while now. As with any voluntary organisation, there's far too much work and far too few people to do it. What makes it harder to switch off is that my other half is also one of the trustees, so there's a real tendency for any conversation we have to somehow turn into a discussion about Esperanto business. We tried to designate a few "Esperanto-free days" while we were on holiday, but met with limited success! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 325 of 522 18 September 2014 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have been to Latvia, and the Serbian trains are worse. Maybe those in Albania could compete, but they drive at weird hours so I didn't use them to get around.
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 326 of 522 19 September 2014 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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I couldn't face more sex scenes this morning, so I tried a different audio book: "Case Histories" by Kate Atkinson. This one is also in Serbian. I haven't read the novel in English, so I don't know what it is about beyond that it is a loosely detective fiction. I listened to the first half hour this morning and it was nice and slow, so easy to understand, but I don't think that listening to audio books for 30 minutes at a time is very productive, because it's hardly long enough to get into either the language or the storyline. Unfortunately I am struggling to think of when I will ever have a period longer than 30 minutes that I can use.
I have watered half the vocab from 'Teach Yourself Croatian' on Memrise. It all seems so easy now, which is a sure sign that I have progressed :) In between Esperanto correspondence last night I spent some time logged into the Interpals website, hoping to find someone to chat to. My dream would be to find a Croatian who likes to exchange long messages. I'm not sure I will succeed with that, but I did manage to exchange a few messages with a guy from Split who - ironically given the thread I started this week - wanted to know why I was learning Croatian. I said something about what an interesting country Croatia is, how much I liked it the first time I went there etc, and he assumed that I must have been in Dalmatia. But actually the first time I went to Croatia was initially to Zagreb, so he was quite surprised. For me the most interesting part of the conversation was that his spelling was ikavian rather than ijekavian (so he wrote "lipo" rather than "lijepo", "uvik" rather than "uvijek" etc). That was the first time I've ever seen that spelling in print, though of course I have read about it theoretically in textbooks. 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 327 of 522 21 September 2014 at 12:46am | IP Logged | ||
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I had great plans for what I was going to do today and I achieved none of it.
I watched one episode of 'Bitange i Princeze' and started reading 'Ušica igle' (Eye of the Needle) by Ken Follett. I listened to this as an audiobook while I was on holiday, and while I was able to follow the basic plot I think I probably missed a lot of the finer points, so I bought the book while I was in Serbia to help fill in the blanks. I'm home alone today so thought I'd take advantage of that to practice my pronunciation by reading the book aloud. I gave up after a few pages because I was having too many problems with my asthma. But I thought to myself "Never mind, I'll play the audio book out loud and follow the text in the book". It sounded like a great plan, but I hadn't factored into it that the audiobook was in Croatian and the paper book was in Serbian. Really you wouldn't think this ought to make too much difference and that there might just be a few places where different words are used. In the first paragraph of the Serbian translation I could see a few words (voz, januar, stanica) which would probably be changed in a Croatian version, but I didn't think that would be a big deal. What hadn't occurred to me was that the book would have been translated twice by two completely different people and that they would have chosen to translate whole sentences in different ways which actually have nothing to do with whether the language is supposed to be Croatian or Serbian but just reflect their personal preferences. For example on the first page the Serbian translation reads: "A onda kad je stiglo proleće, bilo je neverovatno". While the Croatian translation reads: "A onda kad je došlo proljeće, bilo je veličanstveno". The original English was: "Then, when the spring came, it was glorious". That's just a small example of the differences in a short sentence. I listened to/read 14 pages in the end but had to give up. Some of the more complex sentences were phrased so differently that it was hard to tell they were from the same novel. I guess from tomorrow I'll just concentrate on reading the Serbian and forget about the audiobook! It made me think though how much money must be wasted and how much duplication of effort there must be translating things separately into Croatian and Serbian. I hope they manage to reach some sort of compromise about it if Serbia ever joins the EU. In other news I clicked on a headline on the BBC website today only to find a reporter interviewing someone I once had a massive argument with in the Esperanto world. I thought he was a jerk when I knew him five years ago, but sometimes you think perhaps you shouldn't be so harsh and that you ought to give people the benefit of the doubt for being young. Having read the article today it seems clear that I didn't misjudge his character and that five years on he remains an absolute jerk. Sometimes I think people start learning Esperanto with this rose-tinted vision that everyone else who speaks it is a really nice person. Some people never seem to be able to shake this off, even after fifty years in the Esperanto movement. Whatever they're taking, I'd like some of it; five years in the Esperanto movement has been enough to destroy most of my faith in humanity! But personally I find the fact that I periodically meet quite unpleasant Esperanto-speakers quite encouraging because if people can be obnoxious in it then it is definitely a 'real' language :D 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 328 of 522 21 September 2014 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Today has been more productive :)
I read 50 pages of "Ušica igle" this morning. I'm getting on okay reading in Serbian, but I have to be honest and say my preference is to read in Croatian. Or, more precisely, my preference is to read in ijekavian. I've got past the stage now with the ekavian spellings where it takes me 30 seconds to figure out what a word actually is, but it still feels a bit unnatural to me and my concern is that I'm going to start learning new words in their ekavian spelling without realising that they're ekavian and then use them when speaking Croatian by mistake. Like today I came across the word "retkost", which when I looked it up I found meant "rarity". I had the vague impression that I already knew a word for "rarity" and that that wasn't it, but I couldn't remember it so I shrugged and carried on. It was several hours later before I realised that it was actually the same word: "rijetkost"! I guess I just need to get to the point where I have a flashing alarm going off in my head everything I see a word with the letter "e" in it to check whether this is a word with two spellings or not. I'm hoping I will get better at this over time. Of the approx. 20 books I bought in Belgrade all but two are in Serbian, so I will have plenty of materials to practise with at least. In the afternoon I started working through the BCS Grammar textbook. I was trying to read this through cover to cover a few months ago, but I kept losing focus. It's a really comprehensive and detailed description of the grammar and there's way too much information to absorb in one reading. I read it for the first time about 12 months ago, and the majority of it was way over my head. Now I think I've got to a stage where I've done so much reading and expanded my vocabulary enough to benefit from it more. There are definitely some bits that are still way over my head, particularly some of the finer points re accents, vowel lengths and stress which seem to be particularly relevant for Bosnian, but the majority of the content should now be understandable for me. So, to combat the problem of me falling asleep while reading, I've decided to go through it taking notes. I have a new notebook and everything :) I'm limiting myself to one page per chapter (for the initial easy chapters at least), reading through the chapter and writing down anything which strikes me as really interesting and that I didn't properly know before. I've only done four chapters this afternoon, but I've already learned some new things: 1) I think I now understand the difference between iz and od; I was very vague on this before and almost certainly getting it wrong sometimes. 2) I learned that monosyllabic masculine nouns with a stem consonant -c shift this to -č when forming the nominative plural. So the plural of zec (rabbit, hare) is zečevi not zecevi (as I would have written if I'd ever been talking about rabbits!) 3) I learned that if a present tense verb form following ne has a falling accent on the first syllable, this accent gets shifted onto ne as a rising accent. Which is why when you say "ne znam" the accent is on "ne", but when you say "ne govorim" the accent is on "go". I think I would have pronounced those right instinctively based on how many times I have heard them, but I wouldn't have understood why it was like that. With other verbs I now need to pay more attention and figure out whether I'm pronouncing them properly when I negate them or not. I think that's probably enough excitement for one day :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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