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 57 of 522 01 February 2014 at 11:37pm | IP Logged |
This afternoon my emergency laptop charger was delivered to me - yay!!
Once it arrived I had to spend almost five hours on Esperanto work, because there's a
trustee meeting of Esperanto-Asocio de Britio (of which I am the treasurer) next weekend.
That didn't leave a whole lot of time for Croatian, but this evening I managed to catch
up on my Memrise vocab and complete the exercises from Lesson 18 (final chapter) of
'Teach Yourself Croatian'. These were again revision exercises, and not too challenging.
I think I can officially say that I am now done with TYC :)
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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 58 of 522 02 February 2014 at 10:47pm | IP Logged |
I realised I was a bit premature saying that I was done with 'Teach Yourself Croatian'
yesterday, as I haven't actually finished re-listening to all the audio yet. I started
remedying that by listening to the dialogues up to chapter 10 on the way to/from church
this morning.
I'm still plodding along with Memrise and passed the two million points mark today,
which made me happy. Little things, little minds :)
In more exciting news, I spent half of the afternoon finalising my holiday plans for
September. I am flying to Skopje, planning to visit Bitola and Ohrid, then travelling
to Montenegro for a few days by the sea, before taking the train to Belgrade and
ultimately flying home from there. I am very excited, as I have never been to Macedonia
or Serbia before. I'm a little sad too, as it means I'm not going to Croatia this
summer, but I'll still get some language practice and it's good to try new places.
I will definitely want to learn some basic Macedonian before I go, so may tackle this
as a six-week challenge later in the year if I can find some learning materials.
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prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4857 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish
| Message 59 of 522 03 February 2014 at 12:36am | IP Logged |
Skopje, Bitola i Ohrid - zlatni trokut Makedonije :) Sretno!
Ako nešto, imam neke materijale s makedonskog.
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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 60 of 522 04 February 2014 at 12:13am | IP Logged |
I had an early start for work this morning and was too tired to study any Croatian on the
train. I am working away from home again, so missed my Croatian lesson this evening, but
it seems to have been about food. The homework is to write sentence about which foods
people are ordering based on the dialogues in Chapter 5 of 'Teach Yourself Croatian', so
I have spent some time doing that this evening.
I just watched an episode of Poštar Pat called "Savrsena Slika", which is about all the
children in Greendale school having to draw a picture of the best thing which has
happened to them all year. The episode I watched was in Serbian, which I found a little
bit more difficult to follow than Croatian, but I'm sure it is good practice :)
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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 61 of 522 04 February 2014 at 12:56am | IP Logged |
Radioclare wrote:
[...]I just watched an episode of Poštar Pat called "Savrsena Slika", which is about all the children in Greendale school having to draw a picture of the best thing which has happened to them all year. The episode I watched was in Serbian, which I found a little bit more difficult to follow than Croatian, but I'm sure it is good practice :) |
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Just for a laugh I watched that episode and then this one which is meant for Croats. What jumped out at you in the Serbian version which made it a little trickier for you to follow?
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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 62 of 522 04 February 2014 at 8:53am | IP Logged |
Chung wrote:
Just for a laugh I watched that episode and then
this one which is meant for
Croats. What jumped out at you in the Serbian version which made it a little trickier
for you to follow? |
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I think this was probably the first time I've ever listened to some Serbian audio - as
I've been focussing exclusively on Croatian - so although I've obviously come across
Serbian vocab etc in some of my textbooks, it just sounded unusual to me to hear it
spoken. Sometimes it just sounded like someone was speaking Croatian in a funny accent
(šta, tačno) ;) Following dialogue at that speed is the limit of my comprehension at
the moment, so I think it was taking me an extra second or two to register what some of
the words were. The bit I was struggling with most was when they used da + verb
constructions; I've pretty much ignored these as some tricky part of Serbian which
hopefully won't crop up too frequently in Croatian, so I wasn't instantly following
what someone was saying.
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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 63 of 522 04 February 2014 at 3:40pm | IP Logged |
That's interesting in your comment about the speed of the speech as that jumped out at me the most in the Serbian version and gave me the most trouble. Pretty much everything else was fine for me although I think that I've had a longer association with the language than you (I first got into BCMS/SC in 2006) which helped with comprehension.
Don't worry too much about the da + verb constructions although they do appear regularly in Croatian with one circumstance being when the implied subject of the "second" verb is different from that of the "first" verb.
E.g.
1) Želim kupiti novi laptop. "I want to buy a new laptop" (Croatian, Serbian*)
2) Želim da kupim novi laptop. "I want to buy a new laptop" (Serbian*)
3) Želim da Radioclare kupi novi laptop. "I want Radioclare to buy a new laptop" (Croatian, Serbian)
* 1) is not used frequently by Serbs but it is grammatical. When you do encounter it, it's likely that you're dealing with formal register or a Serb who lives outside Serbia. Most Serbs use 2) so frequently that it's become a factoid that 1) is exclusive to Croats.
This thread has examples where the stereotyped "Serbian" construction is acceptable (and seemingly preferred) in Croatian.
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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 64 of 522 04 February 2014 at 10:25pm | IP Logged |
Thank you Chung, that's good to know :) And I'm glad you found the Serbian fast too;
sometimes it's a bit discouraging when you can't follow something aimed at toddlers!
I think I'm okay with 3) as it would be similar in German ("Ich will, dass Radioclare
einen neuen Laptop kauft") so it doesn't feel too unusual to me.
2) is the one I definitely need to work on. I'm going to try to pay more attention to
Serbian now that I know I'm definitely going to Serbia for a few days later in the year.
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