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Radioclare’s TAC log 2014 (*jäŋe/*ledús) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5237 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 513 of 522 22 December 2014 at 10:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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YAY! Keep up the good work!
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| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 514 of 522 26 December 2014 at 12:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hope that everyone who celebrated Christmas had a great one :)
I have been rather spoiled and have had some extremely exciting language-related presents. This book about Macedonian grammar, which I didn't even know existed :) 
These Croatian verb tables, which I am so excited about. I spent years trying to find something like this in English, including walking around the main bookshops in Zagreb and asking, but found nothing. It didn't occur to me to search for it in German. 
When thinking about my goals for next year I have said that German isn't going to be a priority for me, but I have had so many German novels for Christmas that it actually could be :) 
Martin Suter is my favourite Swiss author and I think I have read all of his books except for these two, so I'm really looking forward to them. 'Herzblut' is part of a 'krimi' series about a Bavarian detective called Kluftinger. I was reading the series at the rate of one book per year for a while, treating myself to one whenever I was in Germany, but as I haven't been for a couple of years I've got behind. I'm a little bit scared about reading 'Das Parfum' because I know the storyline is rather grim, but it is a major German work of fiction that I've not read yet so I want to give it a go. I will definitely have plenty to review in the books thread :) I've also had some books in Croatian/Serbian, of course. Two more children's books for me to practise my Cyrillic reading: 
Plus an adult book to read once I have mastered it: 
I also got a few more novels in the Latin alphabet, including another John le Carre, something by Bernard Cornwell, and the fifth and final book in the Conn Iggulden series I was reading about Julius Caesar. My biggest present was probably a beautiful set of the complete works of August Šenoa. I am definitely going to have to improve my Croatian to get through those :D 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 515 of 522 27 December 2014 at 12:28am | IP Logged | |||||
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Christmas aside, I've had quite a productive few days with the benefit of being off
work :) I finished reading the John Le Carre novel 'Misionarska Pesma', which takes me to 188 'books' for the SC. I watched four episodes of the Montenegrin soap opera 'Budva na pjenu od mora' while I was wrapping my Christmas presents (yes, my wrapping really did take over four hours!) and another two episodes this evening. I won't post anything about the storyline here because I don't want to spoil it for Serpent if she is planning to watch it, but I still think the director must have been a 'Sunset Beach' fan in his youth :D I counted that over 6 minutes of the last episode I watched had passed before we finished the recap of previous episodes and the intro music and something actually happened! I am doing better at understanding it now though and can follow what most of the younger characters are saying, but struggle with some of the older ones who seem to have stronger accents. I recorded myself reading the first page of 'Twilight' in Serbian out loud the other day. I was going to upload it to my profile but I couldn't figure out how. I have saved it on my hard drive anyway with the intention that I can work on my pronunciation next year and re-record myself at the end of 2015 to see whether I have improved. I am working on my Cyrillic handwriting, a few letters at a time. Part of the problem with this is that my handwriting isn't very good (and it certainly isn't swirly!) even in English. I found an awesome website for Serbian Cyrillic though which has little videos with a pen drawing each letter so that you can follow what order to do the strokes in and try to copy. I think there are also worksheets you can download and trace the letters on which I haven't tried yet, but I may have to resort to tomorrow if things don't go well. I am still working on my goals and priorities for next year. I know roughly what they are but I'm struggling to break them down into the required daily actions to achieve them. For example a goal for the year is to improve my written Croatian, so I would like to have a goal of writing 50 words in Croatian every day. The problem is that I *know* there are some days (even in January!) that I won't be able to achieve that, so at the moment I have set a weekly goal of writing 350 words in Croatian per week. Perhaps that achieves the same thing but I'm a bit worried that if I set weekly goals I'll leave all my language learning until Sunday afternoons and achieve nothing during the week, so I'm still thinking things over. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 516 of 522 27 December 2014 at 3:02am | IP Logged | |||||
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Awww, thanks for avoiding spoilers!!! I need to catch up haha.
You can also just put a spoiler warning and insert a few empty lines before and after :) As for the goal, you can set separate goals for weekdays and weekends? for example 150 words during the week and 100 at the weekend. of course this way you can procrastinate until friday, but if it's manageable enough you may be more motivated to get it out of the way and enjoy some calm reading or something completely different for friday. you can also award yourself with some English reading time... something like that, hope the ideas help! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 517 of 522 28 December 2014 at 12:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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That's a good idea which I hadn't though of, thank you :) I'm trying to get a balance
between resolutions being challenging and not setting myself up to fail from the start. As far as the SC goes, I think I am going to give up on the idea of trying to complete a double challenge and provisionally my goals are just to read 50 pages of Croatian per week and watch 60 minutes of TV. That's a lot less than what I have been doing since May and I think it might be a compromise between dropping out entirely and freeing up time for other things :) **** I practised writing 50 words in Croatian today and actually wrote 99 without realising :) They weren't 99 very inspiring words, but never mind. I've started with my holiday in Macedonia earlier in the year as a theme in the absence of any better ideas. I also spent another hour or so on my handwriting this morning. I think it is improving - not necessarily in terms of how it looks but it terms of how quickly/easily I can produce my (mangled) versions of the letters. If I look at pictures of Cyrillic handwriting online then the comparison is painful I am reminding myself that people will only put pictures of good handwriting on the internet :) I mean, if you compared my English handwriting to a model text from a handwriting book then it would look pretty dreadful too. Ultimately I am only aiming to have handwriting that is functional for me and that I can understand; I am not trying to win a calligraphy prize. And it is probably just as well :D In a fit of virtue I started trying to make notes from Chapter 10 of my BCS grammar book this afternoon, but gave up after about half an hour when I decided it was a task best tackled completely sober. And I have been enjoying my new Croatian verb tables book; I am going to start copying out verbs by hand every now and again so that I get better at conjugations. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 518 of 522 28 December 2014 at 10:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've been trying to start my resolutions a bit early and get in the habit of writing 50 words of Croatian per day. I wrote
about 99 yesterday and something similar today and got it corrected on Lang 8.
So, what can I learn from those corrections? 1) That I made a couple of silly case errors when I should have known better. Grrr. 2) That I have been reading too much Serbian, because it felt quite natural to say "da kupujem" or "da govorim" rather than "kupiti" or "govoriti". I know those aren't real errors but I guess I just have to be mindful of the fact that they may be perceived as such if I'm trying to pass myself off as speaking 'Croatian' rather than anything else. 3) There were a few word order errors. Word order is definitely something I need to pay more attention to. It's a difficult one, because it isn't always explicitly explained in textbooks. Overall I don't think it went too badly, especially considering that I didn't spend much time on it. This gives me hope that I might be able to manage 50 words per day after all. In other news I have been watching a Belgian TV series which is mainly in Flemish. It's called 'Salamander' and I'd never heard of it (although apparently it has been shown on BBC4) but my sister bought me the DVD for Christmas as I'm going on holiday to Brussels tomorrow, so I've been watching it to get in the mood. It's very exciting and Flemish sounds like an interesting language :) Edited by Radioclare on 28 December 2014 at 10:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4708 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 519 of 522 28 December 2014 at 11:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Flemish isn't a language. It's like saying American is a language :) (Unless you are
talking about some very specific dialects in the west, but then you should clarify with West Flemish and even that's debatable). Any standard Belgian TV series are spoken in Dutch, but they use a standardised Belgian pronunciation (and certain Belgicisms which never occur in the Netherlands). Hence why it's termed Flemish. If you're going to write it, then it's Dutch. It's the same written language, we don't even have spelling differences like in English between the US and UK variants. Edited by tarvos on 28 December 2014 at 11:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Radioclare Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom timeofftakeoff.com Joined 4584 days ago 689 posts - 1119 votes Speaks: English*, German, Esperanto Studies: Croatian, Serbian, Macedonian | Message 520 of 522 28 December 2014 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oops, sorry - I didn't know that! Thanks for clarifying :)
1 person has voted this message useful |
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